Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful (and What UX Professionals Can Do About It)

Who doesn’t love a good, spicy take on something accepted as gospel by a wide swath of people?

I’m talking, of course, about Jared Spool’s take on the Net Promoter Score.

People who believe in NPS believe in something that doesn’t actually do what they want. NPS scores are the equivalent of a daily horoscope. There’s no science here, just faith.

As UX professionals, we probably can’t convince believers that their astrology isn’t real. However, we can avoid the traps and use measures that will deliver more value to the organization.

You might be asking, “What the heck is Net Promotoer Score?” It was supposed to be a way to gauge customers’ feelings towards a business.

In 2003, a marketing consultant named Fred Reichheld lit the business world on fire with the Harvard Business Review article “The One Number You Need To Grow”…He ended the article with “This number is the one number you need to grow. It’s that simple and that profound.”

It turns out, it’s neither simple nor profound.

(Like so many purported Next Big Things™️.)

Spool has so many hot jabs in here and I love it:

[NPS has] all the common requirements of a “useful” business metric:

• It’s easy to measure.
• It produces a number you can track.
• It feels legitimate.

While specifically about NPS, the article is a cautionary tale of leaning into any metric too much. A closer look at how the metric is calculated and you’ll see why someone might say, “Pay no attention to the metric man behind the curtain!”

The article is also a great look at measuring data and asking the right questions:

The best research questions are about past behavior, not future behavior. Asking a study participant Will you try to live a healthy lifestyle? or Are you going to give up sugar? or Will you purchase this product? requires they predict their future behavior. We are more interested in what they’ve done than what they’ll do. We’re interested in actual behavior, not a prediction of behavior.

The sad reality of so many of our metrics is hidden behind the incentives!

If your bonus is tied to an increase in the NPS ratings, offering a $100 incentive is a great way to raise your scores.

The lesson is: be wary of anything that purports to reduce something to a number.