Ask IH: Does NPS matter for you guys?
Hi Indies,
I recently started a discussion on my LinkedIn Profile, and I wanted to push that further with you and the community.
For those who don't know, the Net Promoter Score is a benchmark.
Customers are asked to rate their answers on a 0-10 scale, and then they're divided up into three categories:
- Detractors: 0 - 6
- Passives: 7 – 8
- Promoters: 9 - 10
While NPS may help you understand customer loyalty in the big picture, it doesn’t give you many insights about the reasons why your customers gave you such rating.
It is not a metric that you can solely rely on.
Don’t get me wrong, NPS is great, but NPS is a numerical question, and numerical scales are subjective and interpretive.
Which make it very different from one company to another.
It is a good benchmark, but it is still very biased and unreliable.
It is subjective and interpretive.
Putting people into categories is very restrictive.
In a nutshell, stop asking people subjective questions (NPS, Likert scale, etc.) to your customers…
And instead, study what people do and how.
Study why they use your product or services.
What are your thoughts? Have you had success with this?
I don't get why NPS asks to score from 1 to 10 when the score in interpreted on 1 to 3 scale. Why not directly ask a question with 3 choices?
People on the internet score things very differently. If you check mobile app reviews, you can see that a review "The app was great, but the x feature was bad." can be anything from 1-5 stars depending on the users' mood.
Yes, that's my total point! Thanks for sharing! :)
It's not 1 to 3 scale.
It's 6/2/2 scale. Then calculated to and intermediary 1 to 3.
This is a very important distinction. Where as in 5 star rating system, a 3 star rating may be interpreted as: "satisfactory" at 5 in the NPS calculation would be added to the "less than satisfactory" pool.
Does this make sense? I know you all can read the math, but it's this key distinction that brings the value to the NPS score.
I have been told that, aside from revenue, it's one of the most valuable metrics.
I would use it..........but I have no customers....so........you know... there's that.
Fair point, but still very hard to tell for the end customer.
I think a lot of folks are thinking about this wrong.
There is a reason why most Fortune 1000 companies use NPS and it's scoring structure. Let's not assume we've broken the NPS code or are smarter than the collective Fortune 1000 companies out there.
If you aint getting over a 6 in the eyes of a customer then whether you get a 3 or 4 doesn't matter...they are NOT telling their friends about your company...and that is what you ultimately want and should be striving for.
Build your own NPS survey in the app. Talk to your customers. Get feedback. Don't get bogged down in analysis paralysis. And 1-10 is relevant because we are accustomed to being asked for feedback on that scale are whole life....good or bad math...it resonates and that's why they use it.
We use the FREE tier on Wootric for NPS and we get what we need from it to send the right signals to us to pivot or adjust
Anytime I can talk to our customers (i.e. an NPS survey), it's usually a good thing
"For some reason, NPS thinks that a 6 should be equal to a 0. Nobody else thinks this. Remember, if you worked at a company like Intuit, all that hard work to get everyone to move from a 0 to a 6 would not be rewarded. Your executive would not get their bonus. It’s as if you didn’t do anything." -Jared M. Spool https://blog.usejournal.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-what-ux-professionals-can-do-about-it-fe7a132f4430
I agree. This is not going to be a popular opinion, but at this point the NPS is pretty much meaningless to me due to all the ways it can suffer from selection bias. If you ask people too soon, they haven't had enough time to form an opinion. If you wait until people are really using your app/service, you've left out everyone who has bounced before that and probably wouldn't recommend your app/service. Even if you adjust for people who bounce before you can pop the question, what do you really know after the results are in? Some people like your app? Some people don't like it? So what? You still don't know 'why' or 'what' they like or dislike.
The NPS is a warm/fuzzy 'KPI' that doesn't actually mean anything and even if it did, it produces no actionable intelligence.
Actual user behavior is much more enlightening. You can find out what people who are engaged keep coming back for and you can identify usage patterns for people who bounce.
Yes, and combined it's even more powerful! :)
I'm not sure I'd call NPS subjective. It's a pretty clear question that measure enthusiasm for your product in a straightforward way. It's most useful when you have a very large pool of customers to ask, and you're focussed less on current score and more on the trend. Then it gives you clear data about how you're improving (or not) over time.
I read an article once about a dessert delivery company that maintained profitability for years, even against multiple adversities. Their CEO said he focussed relentlessly on the unit economics (how much does each cookie make us) and NPS (can we keep customers excited and expand inexpensively through word of mouth).
Can you share this article? I also know companies who relied on NPS and ended up crashing.
Far as I know, NPS has only one question, being "Would you recommend company X". As a quick 1-10 rating it's great for centrally assessing a large amount of customers - less so if you only have a handful and direct/personal relationships.
I haven't used NPS myself, but we did use it over several quarters and hundreds of accounts at my previous job. It did help a lot of higher-level optimization (team structures, training programs, policies), which is pretty much what it was designed for.
It's very high-level, and not reliable, that was my point :)
If you trust NPS then you are doomed. NPS scale itself is from 1 to 10 where there is literally no difference between 3 and 4.
Quite confusing: From the end user perspective, it is nothing but a number. The survey should be self-explanatory like (Good, neutral or bad). I find 3 point survey great than NPS 10 score survey. More people to give 3 bar survey rather than 10 points survey. And the problem with this model is it is quite confusing what is different between 3 to 7 number.
Highly inaccurate: Since there is no big difference between 6 & 7 but it tends to change the rating of the product from bad to neutral and vice versa. I say point allocation itself is wrong. Let say 10 people gave 1 star in NPS which is ideally NPS of -100 and another 10 gave 6 stars the NPS still remain same at -100. The formula is stupid.
People Misusing: It usually happens in customer support where people send the NPS only for the satisfied customers which tend to bring good reviews all the time. (This can be rectified)
If NPS is your sole point of quality validation then you are sitting on a time bomb. There are soo many metric apart from that.
Totally agree, and that's our opinion at Feedier.com. We rely on satisfaction ratio that is spread across different metrics.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago