What the hell is NPS anyway?
Net Promoter Score has been the measure of success for many companies, but it only serves to generate what you want to hear.
First, a brief introduction: Net Promoter Score is a methodology used to measure a customer’s “loyalty”. It consists of a quick survey, which has to be sent to the customer after the end of the journey, asking them to say from 0 to 10 whether they would recommend the product or service purchased.
The result is the result of a simple calculation that illustrates the ratio between promoting customers and detracting customers. If the figure is high, it means that you have a low % of customers who have had a bad experience (and would therefore be brand detractors), and that you have a good deal of word-of-mouth marketing going on among your customers.
Today, this metric dictates whether companies need to invest in customer experience, and it is also used as a benchmark to compare with other companies in the same industry.
My problem with NPS is firstly the question: would you recommend it?
Here I’m going to dust off the neurons used in my high school days to analyze the future tense. By definition, it refers to something that could have happened, but won’t necessarily happen. It expresses uncertainty. Basically, it’s the tense we use to avoid saying no.
“I could do the dishes…”.
“We’d love to…”.
“He would play the guitar…”.
It’s usually followed by a “but” to say that:
“I could do the dishes, but I can’t right now.”
“We’d love to, but we have other commitments.”
“He would play the guitar, but that day he forgot to bring it.”
A person saying 10, on a metric of 0 to 10, that they would recommend a product, does not mean that they will recommend it or that they have recommended it. It’s a question with zero implications if the person lies (and human beings by nature lie to please). Or do you love getting socks as a present and seeing lipstick kissed on your 4-year-old’s cheek?
It’s a question that asks people to lie, which means that the NPS is usually very high, even for very bad products and services. That’s because the term “would recommend” means absolutely nothing. It’s an evasive verb tense.
Another observation is that not everything is a recommended product or service. The product needs to appear in subjects, be a conversational topic for the question to make sense. People rarely talk about hemorrhoid creams or printer toner…
Measuring satisfaction and recommendation are different things from NPS. However, as it is standardized, it is still the darling of companies. My suggestion for replacing NPS is: do you want to know if your customers are satisfied? Ask them if they are satisfied. Do you want to know if they would recommend the product? Ask them if they have already recommended the product. Then you can start to get a sense of whether you need to invest in the customer journey and how (and if) any word-of-mouth marketing of your product is taking place.