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NPS is the KFC of quality metrics.
Nothing good about it, it's everywhere, and the locals keep going there despite how unhealthy it is.
— Jared Spool (@jmspool) October 6, 2017
It’s been a while since I enjoyed a long form tweetstorm — so I was glad to read Jared Spool’s scathingly fun criticism of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) instrument.
As someone who likes NPS, did my opinion about it change at all? Yes!
As someone who grew up eating KFC (I mean, how do you resist that salty greasy goodness?) I fully understand the deliciousness of the metric as a believable cure-all.
Will I stop using it? No!
I definitely will be using it less — now that I have more carefully examined what goes into my KFC chicken bucket thanks to Jared and friends. But if I am really hungry and I know that only a trip to KFC/NPS will hit the spot for me, I’ll definitely sneak it in when I want to.
All things “bad for you” aren’t guaranteed to always be bad. It’s expecially bad in the cases when you are overusing or misusing them unconsciously, and when you are consciously seeking to exact badness to yourself or others with such means. But when used sparingly, consciously, and with good intentions — something good can happen. So I’ll be holding on pressing the full-delete key on my NPS brain cells for now.
1 Comment
John, I recently came across a different metric – Customer Improvement Score. This is in the context of software services and the question it asks is a likert scale again, but asks about the impact of the services provided on client’s business. So on a scale of 1-10.
I can see this being modified to other industries also , including food industry. I think the core is to understand why people buy the product /service. Essentially we take jobs-to-be-done and measure how effective a product/service is in performing that job effectively.
This is a hypothesis, but I believe that business should measure part of their success in terms of their customer’s success.