NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful

Companies with a promoter level score during the pandemic grew their business. There is a direct correlation between a promoter NPS and revenue growth. The percentage of companies that now provide a promoter level service is now over 20%, up from 13% before the pandemic. The percentage that are rated a detractor level score also grew to nearly 50%. These org’s revenues either shrank or stagnated. This is an existential issue for organizations, not a nuisance KPI.

Companies that are leaders in NPS are leaders in employee engagement. This post sounded pretty frustrated with an employer/contract…

NPS is a measure of past experiences, it isn’t a GPS navigation system to improvement. It is also 1 question, so it is the most simple to collect. However even this gets screwed up all the time. Interfaces such as a telephone where 10 can be measured as the first digit 1, or PIN pads where they are a nuisance to a customer when in a hurry to pay and missed when paying with NFC.

Understanding negative NPS is like understanding a traffic ticket with no other data. Why did I get a traffic ticket? Well, what did or didn’t you do and how fast were you doing it? Were you a jerk to the cop? Was the cop stressed by something else that day?

To be a leader in NPS is an organizational effort, not the result of divining an insight from a few survey answers. Ideally, customer journeys maps have been developed and problem areas are self evident before an NPS score arrives.

This post misses that the primary benefit of an NPS program is not the metric—that's a nice byproduct—it's the dialogue with customers.

As a single metric Net Promoter Score is OK. It's extremely easy for customers to answer. So there's volume in the number of answers. You can learn more by segmenting different ways—Users vs Admins, Enterprise vs SMB, Verticals, etc..

The company I currently work for puts a lot into NPS, not necessarily the metric, but the process. Everyone that leaves feedback gets a follow-up email and interview from someone in Product or User Research. That feedback is then organized in Productboard where it is grouped with similar requests/issues. Overall those interviews heavily weigh what features we refine and build.

For some background, I previously designed an NPS tool and have written about NPS pretty extensively.

https://solomon.io/understanding-net-promoter-score/

You can do a lot of things with a number that are not optimizing.

For example, you can satisfy it, you can alert on behavior, or you can use it as a control (but ok, maybe this one makes a two number KPI instead of two KPIs).

Yes, that's correct. The broader point is that it's really hard to boil down something as complex as user satisfaction to a number. My time spent with UX professionals has taught me that all of these measures are lossy, and my time with data scientists has taught me that once you start depending too much on lossy measures, you're going to be led astray.

But management-types love little numbers like NPS, so it usually gets done anyways, especially in big orgs. And then it goes downhill, because PMs and leads are incentivized to optimize for the particular number their management chain tells them matters, and they game it because that's how people work. Later on, frustrated engineers and PMs who aren't a part of that game wonder if they're the crazy ones because they see very real customer frustrations brushed aside by an org structure that doesn't seem to care much about what users actually tell them anymore. Or they say they do, but never incentivize the rest of the org to address issues coming in through verbatim feedback.

Maybe, someone with the title of VP eventually wonders why a competitor is doing really well, looks at verbatim feedback themselves (it's usually been given to them already but they forgot about it), and then realizes they've been steering a big ship in the wrong direction, and causes chaos all kinds of chaos in the process. The sycophants in the org all line up to agree with them and declare they were right all along (and get rewarded at the end of the year), line managers and their reports are left confused because of the jolting priority shift, and people who might have felt vindicated by the direction shift are wondering if their leadership are actually fit to be leaders or not.

Is that all the fault of NPS or other numbers? Of course not! But they're an easy and generally accepted way for bad leaders to hide their bad leadership.

If you convert it to IEEE 754, it could be -0. ;)