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NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

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Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

#51

Post by incompleteCode »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

I see proposals against NPS like this from time to time, but they always tend to ignore the underlying science that went into making NPS in the first place, primarily that there was a very strong correlation between the calculated NPS score and business performance. Also, I find that many of these articles have somewhat of a caricaturish view of how NPS is used in the real world. "It's not 'oh no, our NPS score is do…

IDK, in my experience NPS prioritization trends towards "hiring more people to focus on customer happiness."

Source: Worked in multiple startups that IPO'd using this as one of their 'growth strategies'

Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

#52

Post by paulmooreparks »

Lazare wrote: post #36

You know what would be vastly better than NPS? Ask people every so often how they're feeling about the product. Let them pick a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If they pick thumbs down, say "we're sorry you hear that. Please let us know what's bothering you", and display a little text box. Carefully read every comment you receive. Asking unhappy users for feedback is a great idea. The 0 to 10 scale and - especially - the…

Be careful how you do this. When an app interrupts my normal workflow to ask me to rate the app or ask me how I'm enjoying the app, the answer is always negative. I'm using the app to get work done, not satisfy some VP's KPIs.

Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

#53

Post by muzani »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #11
madeofpalk wrote: post #5

My "problem" with NPS is when essential services, which I have next to no choice over using, ask me if i would recommend them to others. No, IRS, I would never recommend your service to friends or family. That's not really indicative of anything.

Ah, like the good old > How likely are you to recommend Windows 10 to a friend or colleague? Please explain why you gave this score. > I need you to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to one another

I think people recommend operating systems more than any other software. Windows vs Mac vs whatever Linux. Android vs iOS. My mother lived in the era when Bill Gates was the villain and refused to update to Win 10 because she expected it to have microtransactions or something.

Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

#55

Post by jldugger »

xraystyle wrote: post #13
actually_a_dog wrote: post #7

I suspect the concept of NPS is, if not the source of, a major driver of the whole "anything less than 10/10, 5 stars, etc. is basically a fail" meme. There seem to be signifiant toxic effects from this on customer-facing employees, in my experience.

This is absolutely a massive issue with it. Apple did this with retail employees back in the day and it was terrible. Employee reviews were based on it, managers had to call customers and apologize if the customer didn't leave a 9 or 10 rating, it was absolutely awful. One of the biggest problems with it is that an average person, unaware of what NPS is, doesn't understand that giving any rating less than a 9 is esse…

> giving any rating less than a 9 is essentially giving a rating of zero.

Well, at least its not a negative number!

Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

#56

Post by rkk3 »

itsdrewmiller wrote: post #46
rkk3 wrote: post #24

> (The most irritating — and by far the most common — reason companies seem to measure NPS is that it’s standardized, but more importantly that everyone else does it. Which is fine for one-time-use benchmarking, but not a good basis for internal KPIs.) Except the alternative isn't to stop tracking NPS the alternative is to use unstandardized customer survey metric's, this is worse because you have no true industry co…

https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/customer/wha... is another standardized alternative, that I suspect would suffer less from the problems in the article.

CSAT is not standardized and there are many ways to calculate it, one of which you have linked. I've seen firsthand many of the largest brands calculate it differently.

Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

#57

Post by Silasdev »

Why do everyone seem to think that management does not have actual good intentions with measuring NPS as a KPI? The companies I've worked with have all had genuinely good intentions making the best possible experience for the user, because that is what ultimately wins in the end. If someone scores 1-6, you ask them to provide additional feedback, to learn from it - problem solved and everyone has all the info they need to go about their work.

There seems to be this idea that KPIs are evil and interpreted in vacuum. It's rarely like that.

Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

#58

Post by switch007 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

I see proposals against NPS like this from time to time, but they always tend to ignore the underlying science that went into making NPS in the first place, primarily that there was a very strong correlation between the calculated NPS score and business performance. Also, I find that many of these articles have somewhat of a caricaturish view of how NPS is used in the real world. "It's not 'oh no, our NPS score is do…

> "It's not 'oh no, our NPS score is down, let's hire more people to focus on customer 'happiness'"

This is precisely what happened at my company, hah.

Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

#59

Post by dcposch »

aagha wrote: post #42
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

I see proposals against NPS like this from time to time, but they always tend to ignore the underlying science that went into making NPS in the first place, primarily that there was a very strong correlation between the calculated NPS score and business performance. Also, I find that many of these articles have somewhat of a caricaturish view of how NPS is used in the real world. "It's not 'oh no, our NPS score is do…

> As a software engineer I love reading our NPS reports, because they always have great tidbits of info that are often difficult to deduce just by looking at standard analytics. What you love is the customer feedback--this can be accomplished in multiple ways and you don't need NPS for it.

NPS has the advantage of being concrete and simple, producing evenly sampled feedback. This is hard to get any other way.

A proper NPS asks only one question and requires only a single click to answer -- eg "Scale of 1-10 how likely are you to recommend to a friend?" > click [8] > done.

There's a free-text "Tell us more" field that is totally optional.

This means users actually answer it. NPS feedback is the closest I've ever seen to being a clean sample.

By contrast:

- Everyone hates an n-question "would you like to fill out our survey" feedback form. Any data from those is going to be skewed, because only a certain kind of person fills those, and usually only if they're angry enough that they want to vent.

- Feedback from a passive "Submit feedback" button in-app is also skewed. Maybe useful as a bug report mechanism, but it won't tell you what's making your happy users happy.

- Proactively reaching out and talking to/observing users is obviously good, and nothing ever substitutes for that. But you want bulk data, not just anecdotal evidence.

- Most importantly, NPS really shines at telling you what's making your almost-happy users almost-happy. When someone clicks [10] and writes "I love it", that feels great. But when someone clicks [7] and tells you what's annoying them, that's often extremely useful.

- NPS does a great job priming people to give useful feedback. By forcing you to pick a single out-of-10, you just did a quick mental accounting. "9? Nahh, ." Then you click 8 and write the reason.

--

NPS was popularized by that famous HBS study where they found it correlates well with product growth.

I wonder how much of that result is simply because it's one of the least obnoxious ways of sampling user feedback, and therefore produces clean data.

Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

#60

Post by MrPatan »

edsrzf wrote: post #35
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

I see proposals against NPS like this from time to time, but they always tend to ignore the underlying science that went into making NPS in the first place, primarily that there was a very strong correlation between the calculated NPS score and business performance. Also, I find that many of these articles have somewhat of a caricaturish view of how NPS is used in the real world. "It's not 'oh no, our NPS score is do…

Honest question: what science? Any good papers you could recommend? After a quick search it seems that NPS originated in a Harvard Business Review article, which I don't consider a credible source of scientific results. The scientific papers I'm seeing mostly seem pretty skeptical, judging from the abstracts.

They're using the popular meaning of "science": A claim from an impressive or impressive-sounding person or institution.
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