It’s Not the Number Stupid: Net Promoter® is not a Numbers Game

I’m sure you’ve heard of Bill Clinton’s famous, but unofficial, 1992 campaign slogan: “It’s the economy stupid”. His chief of staff wanted to focus everyone on what was most important in the run up to the election.

That was a great approach but today I’m championing an NPS anti-version of that slogan:

Setting NPS Targets Is Bad for Business

Over the years I’ve had many conversations with senior managers of small, and not so small, businesses, which are looking to implement Net Promoter.

Great idea, until they tell me it’s with the specific purpose of tracking the performance of their staff.

Typically these businesses have grown to the point where senior managers are not able to be everywhere at once. They worry about company reputation as they grow increasingly disconnected from the day to day interactions with customers.

This increasing distance is not bad per se, there are only so many individual customers the CEO of a major bank can meet in person. What is bad is trying to insert a metric (any metric) into the process with the idea that it will keep everyone in line.

And on the surface it seems quite rational; run a transaction survey, associate the relevant (sales, support, etc.) staff with the response and then report on the individual’s score.

Use the score to hand out bouquets or brickbats at the end of the quarter or year. We do it with sales, why not Net Promoter Score?

But it’s not the same.

Sales are an absolute number.

Net Promoter is not. It is calculated from a sample and is subject to a range of sample size caveats.

Net Promoter is a great tool but great tools can be used to cause great harm when applied in the wrong way. Just ask Alfred Nobel about dynamite.

Sadly, many boardrooms haven’t caught up to that lesson.

Cigna tied executive bonuses to its NPS score in February 2025.

Forrester puts the share of CX leaders paying staff for a target NPS at around half.

Even Fred Reichheld, the man who invented the metric, told CX Dive what he thinks of tying pay to NPS:

The Problems With Giving NPS Targets to Staff

It Almost Guarantees Score Begging

The problem with focusing the entire organisation on just the score then doubling down by including it in the bonus system is that it drives the wrong behaviours.

You might think that providing a front line sales employee with a bonus for a high personal NPS will make them focus on improving their score.

And it does.

And what is the easiest way to improve the score? Ask the customer to rate them highly when they receive the survey.

It’s called score begging. Simple, and it actively hurts the business.

If you doubt score begging happens just listen the next time you pick your car up after a service. In many cases you will be asked directly or indirectly to give the service a “9 or 10” in the survey.

Or, the next time you stay in a hotel, check out the variety of ways they beg for scores.

NPS Score Begging in a Hotel Environment

Not only do these tactics make customers feel uncomfortable but you lose all value in the information you are receiving.

Is that 10 a “real” 10 or a “10 that should have been a 7”? Now all of your data is tainted, which is exactly the failure mode we cover in the disadvantages half of our NPS pros-and-cons rundown.

Charlie Munger said it perfectly at the 2016 Berkshire Hathaway meeting:

Your NPS Focus Should Be on Improvement

Improving your score by asking the customer for a better number does not drive ongoing improvement in the business. By taking the shortcut you have lost your ability to understand how to make change and drive improvement in the business.

Your Staff Don’t Control Most of the Drivers of NPS

With very few exceptions, your business systems, not individual staff, drive the majority of the customer experience.

Most staff are looking to do the right thing by the company and its customers. If they are unable to deliver an excellent service it is normally not because they are unwilling but because they are unable due to company systems.

Put another way, focusing on motivating staff to somehow do their job better drives much less improvement in Net Promoter, or Customer Satisfaction or Customer Effort Score, or whatever other metric you want to use, than driving change in business processes.

The Right Way to Design NPS Incentives

Report Mostly on How NPS Drives the Improvement Process

You are probably already (or planning to) report the NPS® or customer satisfaction score in the weekly, monthly, quarterly management report. That’s good because you need to track where you are but you need to lower the focus on the score and elevate the importance of the improvement projects.

This can be done by simply reporting on, at the same level and in the same place, the continuous improvement projects that the data from the voice of the customer process is creating.

In the reports you can, and should, include information on the expected ROI of the improvement process.

This will change how people view the score from a retrospective tracking of performance to a proactive way to drive change in the business.

Target Response Rate Not NPS for Front Line Staff

Instead of giving front line staff an NPS target, give them a response rate target.

That way they don’t have to beg for scores and it shifts that focus to collecting as much information as possible.

Staff will stop asking for a 10 and start asking just for a response, which is what you really want.

There’s a second reason this works: representativeness.

If only the customers who had a great experience bother to reply, your NPS looks fine while the real problems go uncounted. A response rate target fixes the sample before you ever look at the score, which is worth more than chasing the number itself.

Delay Adding NPS Targets to KPIs

All that being said, if you don’t include NPS in the company KPIs and show that it is at least as important as revenue and profit, staff will never become engaged.

They will forever see NPS as something nice to have but when it comes to deciding where to spend their time it’s revenue and profit this quarter that matters.

So you should report it and talk about it but do it slowly. If you add targets to your KPIs too quickly you will make one or both of these mistakes:

You Will Set The NPS Target Too High

Many, many times senior managers caught up in the excitement of Net Promoter will set targets almost as soon as the first survey responses come in. In their excitement and with their lack of insight into how the score will evolve, they set targets that are too high, or more often, way too high.

Wait for a few months, six at least, before setting Net Promoter or Customer Satisfaction targets. Report and track the data from day one but don’t add targets until much later.

You Will Not Know How To Change It

If you set targets without knowing what drives the score, it’s just a lottery.

The problem with lotteries is that you can’t develop a strategy or action plan to succeed. Beyond buying lots of tickets, nothing you can do will change the odds of success.

In this situation staff engagement with the idea of Net Promoter and continuous improvement will plummet because they can’t see how they can impact the outcome.

So it becomes a number they can ignore. If they win the NPS lottery, great. If they lose, there was nothing they could do about it anyway.

Take a Step Back

So, take a step back for a few minutes.

Why are you implementing your customer feedback process?

If it’s to drive continuous improvement in the customer experience, that’s great.

If you are simply trying to look over the shoulder of each employee as they engage with your customers, maybe you need to review things a little.

If you’re not sure whether your NPS process is driving improvement or just tracking people, it’s worth a conversation before you set next quarter’s targets.