If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
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If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
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Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
#2I’m inferring that NPS here refers to “Net Promoter Score” [0]. Presumably within his niche, the author can assume his readers already know that.
Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
#3I would go a step further: NPS is a garbage metric.
First, you start by assuming your customers can even reasonably ascertain their likelihood to recommend. They can't; there are people who answer 10 but will never recommend, and there are people who answer 0 but already have and will again.
Next, you assume your customers are idiots and don't know how an 11-point scale works by adjusting the midpoint: Instead of 5, the middle is now 7 and 8.
Then you realize there are two many numbers, so you throw several out by reducing your 11-point scale to a 3-point scale, after which you re-interpret "unlikely to recommend" as "likely to snag some other customers on my way out the door."
Finally you calculate your 'net promoters' by subtracting the percentage of low scores from the percentage of high scores to give you a nice round number that doesn't correlate with what's actually happening in the real world.
And this is just what happens when you do it 'the right way.'
NPS is said to measure growth using loyalty as a proxy. But then, what does that have to do with recommendations? Nothing.
Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
#4I’m inferring that NPS here refers to “Net Promoter Score” [0]. Presumably within his niche, the author can assume his readers already know that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
I would have expected everyone to have heard of it by now. I first saw it mentioned on HN in 2017 or so. Good reminder that there's always newer folks around and to define the terms!
Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
#5I would go a step further: NPS is a garbage metric. First, you start by assuming your customers can even reasonably ascertain their likelihood to recommend. They can't; there are people who answer 10 but will never recommend, and there are people who answer 0 but already have and will again. Next, you assume your customers are idiots and don't know how an 11-point scale works by adjusting the midpoint: Instead of 5,…
Bahaha oh man this brings back memories. I worked for a startup where the CEO spent weeks working on determining our NPS and talking our ears off about it. At the end of the process, he was so happy - our NPS was higher than Apple! I didn’t really know what that meant but I figured he had an MBA and knew what he was doing.
The startup never became profitable and ran out of investor money 18 months later.
There were many things wrong with the company but this was one of the things that made me most feel like I was in Office Space.
Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
#6I 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 even mean to recommend to others?
Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
#7I 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.
Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
#8I’m inferring that NPS here refers to “Net Promoter Score” [0]. Presumably within his niche, the author can assume his readers already know that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
I never knew this was an actual "thing."
Like, I've seen these for years. It feels like 5 seconds after I open any given website a "rate us on 1-5" popup shows up right in the middle of the screen. I assumed it was just some thing that's automatically thrown in just to annoy users and has no practical purpose, like the cookie warnings (that are ignored regardless of what you select), the email spam requests (which nobody reads despite what people claim [if someone out there wants to get angry and claim their daily spam emails and annoying popups do good for their business, go ahead {I will laugh at you}]), and the "subscribe/follow us on (social media)" that plague every site these days.
Knowing some manager is thinking this is valuable info and this may decide their job is just hilarious. I used to randomly pick numbers just to dismiss it but now I'm motivated to actively mess with them.
Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
#9NPS, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and Astrology are all things that seem scientific, get a lot of attention, and are junk.
Re: If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
#10NPS, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and Astrology are all things that seem scientific, get a lot of attention, and are junk.
At least astrology has some interesting historical background.
That is the only redeeming quality of any of them, however.