NPS is a waste of time. Use these metrics instead

Ask any executive what the top 3 metrics they watch in their company are and you’ll get some combination of revenue and sales metrics and, of course, the company’s NPS. Net Promoter Score, a measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty, is so widespread and common that over two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 claim to use it. It’s popularity might lead you to believe it was introduced decades ago, forged in years of trial and error and scientifically tuned to become the “one metric to rule them all” in enterprise and startup alike. It turns out it was introduced in 2003 by Fred Reichhold in an HBR article called The Only Number You Need to Grow. In that article Reichhold rightfully sees word-of-mouth marketing as a key driver of growth and, in fact, without these “promoters” exponential growth is nearly impossible. He posited that a short survey with the right questions could predict customer loyalty. And so, the NPS survey was born.

(I’m working with the assumption that most of you know what NPS is but if not, there is a short overview here.)

The cult of NPS has grown so quickly that there is almost no service or commercial experience today that doesn’t end with a short survey. Often times those survey requests are accompanied with a nudge to rate the company highly. Over the years though, many have raised objections about the validity and supremacy of NPS as the core metric the organisation should work to improve. Along with complaints of organisations pushing for high ratings (gaming the system in…