If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric
56 comments
·February 4, 2025ggm
mhuffman
>what does it even mean to recommend to others?
I will give you a real-world example. My girlfriend works for the government and they have an initiative to do outreach to people in the local community and let them know of all the funded help available to people for different situations.
However, they can't go to all 30k+ households at once and even in targeted areas (which is the way it works now) it takes a very long time to get to everyone.
The thinking about a recommendation is that perhaps they go to a home and let the person know about all the free programs available and leave a list with phone numbers. And this person might not need that information at the moment, but maybe they know someone in their family or from church or elsewhere that could use it and they let them know.
I do understand that if you help people who have lost their home due to fire it is silly to do a survey and ask them if they would or did tell someone else in case their home burns down. However, it isn't across the board silly even or not for profit cases.
ggm
That's a good counter example. Not "would you recommend" but "if you were trying to help somebody do you believe we've done enough to make it easy to explain how to use us"
number6
> 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
MarcelOlsz
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.
black_puppydog
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...
superjan
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.
aqueueaqueue
Would you recommend is probably easier to track as an OKR. You can keep asking it every quarter for new data to pat (or smack) yourself.
tinco
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).
superjan
Ok. I am clearly out of my comfort zone here. So NPS is not a proxy for organic marketing success, but for customer satisfaction. Is the article’s point then that the question is sometimes too hypothetical?
I still think that it is useful to track actual reccomendations when that is expected to happen.
tinco
The article is literally just not on point. They're confused about what NPS is for, and wrote a confused article about it.
I agree that it's very useful to track where your leads come from, and I love the short radio button lists that allow you to select a source.
If you feel like you should only ask one question, and it's either that or the NPS question, then it really depends on what your goals are at that point. Are you trying to figure out if your customers are happy with your product, or are you trying to figure out which of your marketing channels is most effective?
I think tracking NPS over time is really powerful, so then you're tracking not an absolute number, but you're tracking if customers have recently changed their opinion of you.
conductr
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.
null
pflenker
At scale, a relevant number of your customers talk. One example in TFA is that customers do not have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to each other. Well, I'm sorry, but in my bubble they certainly do. I have recommended more operating systems than car models to others.
The other thing the article misses IMO is that detraction is also growth, albeit negative growth (and additionally, people are in my experience much more likely to passionately recommend _against_ something they hate than recommending something they love). So the NPS tells you a thing or two about: - Your potential to utilise whichever chance you have to grow via word of mouth - Your potential to squander that same chance due to people hating your product - Your potential to have negative growth because your customers are leaving in droves.
SanjayMehta
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.
smcin
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 from '5' to '7' results in anything tangible. On the other hand you can actually measure sales and attribute which channel they came from.
beAbU
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.
smcin
I said "used to put it". In the early days of Amazon, it totally differentiated itself from other online and brick-and-mortar sellers of books(/CDs/etc.) on price, speed, accuracy, customer support, responsiveness.
Obviously it has evolved since into a huge organization and many other things have changed.
jonahhorowitz
I occasionally answer a customer support survey, just because I know the person on the other end probably gets to keep their job or not based on some average score, but I am not wasting my time answering a NPS survey for some random app or company that I've used. It's just not worth my time and I get too many surveys to care.
web007
Every time you get one of those surveys rank them at zero, then add "Net Promoter Score is a flawed vanity metric and shouldn't be used for business purposes" in the comment box. Sometimes I link the Wikipedia NPS "Criticism" section as well.
Most places don't care about the results from an actual customer service perspective. The above gets crickets, not even an auto responder.
For companies that do care (tiny startups, mostly) I've gotten IMMEDIATE personal email responses from CEOs and founders asking what they can fix for a zero NPS. That's a great place to link the criticism section if not done previously, and to provide useful, raw feedback on what you love/hate about their products.
kevingadd
This tanks the evaluation of any individuals you interacted with while dealing with the company, which can impact their pay or even push them towards getting laid off for low performance. So I'd advise caution when applying this particular idea, since many employers use these surveys to decide who to fire.
lmm
That's "negotiate with terrorists" logic. I'm not going to pretend to take some company's bullshit seriously because they implicitly threaten to fire their employees at random if I don't.
(I do advocate for laws against arbitrary firings and encourage employees to unionise and/or move to jurisdictions with strong labour laws).
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.
blitzar
I did not realise they meant it literally.
Would I recommend a product to others? Yes. Does it ever come up in conversation? No. Do I go around telling random people about this product? No.
Simon_O_Rourke
I work in a company where they try NPS both with customers and staff. Both of these NPS results were available in very fine grained (anonymous) reports... That is until quite recently.
Previously we had access to all the freeform comments, such as "as a customer we need feature X", or "as a staff member we want to see more transparency around Y".
Today, after a few particularly turblent quarters including layoffs, all we get to see are summarized versions of the staff NPS.
Vanity project indeed.
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.
dredmorbius
NPS: Net promoter score.
Expand your initialisms, folks.
jbb67
My answer is usually I think your product is great but I'm not going to recommend it to anyone.
So you get a zero even though you're product is great.
Ask the right question!
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 even mean to recommend to others?