Fear and loathing of NPS

Jackie Huba at The Church of the Customer has blogged about Mouthonomics — the financial windfall from word of mouth marketing as measured by a company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). It was a comforting blog to read, especially after all the snarky comments I’ve read about NPS recently. One thing’s for sure, there are no end of opinions about NPS. For an unbiased discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of NPS, I can’t recommend enough this report (PDF) by Justin Kirby and Alain Samson.

We just ran our first NPS survey and I published the results publicly. My feeling is that it’s a good number to track, but it doesn’t give you all the answers. It’s a metric, nothing more. For what it’s worth, I think it’s a better metric than revenue growth for helping companies to predict future growth; it’s a good bellwether.

More important than the metric is the feedback (we include an open text field and prompt respondents to tell us why they gave us the score), including the feedback from the 7′s and 8′s, the so-called passives. Frankly, many of the passives gave us better praise than the promoters (9′s and 10′s), and many of the promoters had strong criticism. ie, you can’t just look at the number and rest on your butt. The true work begins after the survey to try and address the concerns and issues that customers are experiencing.