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If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric

elliotcsmith.com

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Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric

#31

Post by MarcelOlsz »

number6 wrote: post #29

> I need you to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to one another Maybe you are in the wrong crowd, but the crowd that does do recommendations on operating systems it is rarely windows that is recommended

Software is so abysmal that when I find a good product I scream it from the heavens. For example I've moved multiple teams off whatever ticketing system they were using and moved them to Linear.app which was extremely painless and paid dividends.

Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric

#32

Post by tinco »

superjan wrote: post #16

In stead of asking “would you reccomend”, shouldn’t you rely on “how did you learn about us?”, or “why did you buy our product”, the first one being the most reliable, as it is a neutral question about a fact.

No, the goal of tracking NPS is to find out whether the customer enjoys the product enough that they would recommend it. Whether the customer would recommend it to other potential customers is almost completely irrelevant. The article is the author realizing what NPS is meant for, not some hot take.

Asking "How did you learn about us?" is a question that helps evaluate your marketing and sales pipeline. Asking "Would you recommend?" is about helping your product development process. Your sales / marketing team can't effectively influence the NPS (only thing they could do is divert marketing from customers that wouldn't be satisfied by the product).

Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric

#33

Post by black_puppydog »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #31
number6 wrote: post #29

> I need you to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to one another Maybe you are in the wrong crowd, but the crowd that does do recommendations on operating systems it is rarely windows that is recommended

Software is so abysmal that when I find a good product I scream it from the heavens. For example I've moved multiple teams off whatever ticketing system they were using and moved them to Linear.app which was extremely painless and paid dividends.

Yeah, reminds me of that episode of the Corecursive podcast literally called "Software that doesn't suck". Just reaching the threshold of "people use this software daily and don't think it sucks" is so rare that it's a point of pride.

https://corecursive.com/software-that-doesnt-suck-with-jim-b...

Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric

#34

Post by mcintyre1994 »

I always find this metric bizarre when companies ask about it. Everything is in either a category of things I’m not going to bother talking about, or I’ve already recommended it to people who might care, or I’ve already anti-recommended it to those people. Those are 0, 10, 0 I guess. I’m never like “well I haven’t mentioned it yet but there’s a 60% chance I’ll recommend it at some point”

From when I worked at a company that used it I seem to recall it was actually just used as binary too. 8+ is good and everything else is bad or something like that. So it’s weird that they collect it with such fake precision.

Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric

#35

Post by beAbU »

smcin wrote: post #12
SanjayMehta wrote: post #7

I never understood the logic behind that asymmetric ranking scale. Around 16 years ago our CEO was talked into using this. After 3 quarters of using it, he killed it because it wasn’t making any visible change in sales; the only metric he cared about.

Essentially it says few customers will move the needle on bringing you new business, only the ones who rave wildly about you. Hence, "Customer obsession" as Amazon's Bezos used to put it. Since NPS and changes in NPS is measured by surveys, not attributing individual sales, it's a KPI that's gameable (especially when used on its own); near-impossible to tell whether "improving" NPS in some existing-customer segment f…

There's irony in bringing up Amazon here: From what I've seen, the thing most people rave about when it comes to Amazon is it's customer service. Everything else is pretty mid: the products are poor quality, sometimes counterfeit and if you are not careful way overpriced.

Amazon is not selling customer service as a separate product, yet that's the product that most customers really rave about, even though they don't really like anything else about Amazon.

Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric

#38

Post by neom »

NPS is very useful at millions of customers scale provided you don't conduct the research yourself and pay for it to be done correctly by a firm who knows how to extract the information fairly. Basically: NPS is a solid late stage business tool but isn't applicable until your customer base is sprawling and you want to understand the mechanics of your brand more.

Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric

#39

Post by conductr »

tinco wrote: post #32
superjan wrote: post #16

In stead of asking “would you reccomend”, shouldn’t you rely on “how did you learn about us?”, or “why did you buy our product”, the first one being the most reliable, as it is a neutral question about a fact.

No, the goal of tracking NPS is to find out whether the customer enjoys the product enough that they would recommend it. Whether the customer would recommend it to other potential customers is almost completely irrelevant. The article is the author realizing what NPS is meant for, not some hot take. Asking "How did you learn about us?" is a question that helps evaluate your marketing and sales pipeline. Asking "Would…

Also it’s something you can track over time. It’s not meant to market really, it’s meant to gauge how your customers view your company and areas of operations that may need improvement.

Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric

#40

Post by shoo »

ggm wrote: post #6

I work in a not for profit functional monopoly space. A member body distributing resources according to policy. I can get why we do satisfaction scores, but NPS never made sense to me. Like, does the justice system do NPS for family law cases? It's not like you can get divorced in a 7-11 by the clerk, and even mediation is a process inside the model so NPS in a non competitive self-regulated monopoly.. what does it e…

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend the use of NPS as a metric to a fictitious competitor in your not for profit functional monopoly space?
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