Net Promoter Score Disadvantages and Validity

How to build a rock solid Net Promoter Business Case 

Implementing an NPS program isn’t just a tiny departmental implementation, it’s a business wide change which requires a significant investment and human resources. 

Most NPS ambassadors say that the largest struggle in the implementation of NPS in their business is getting buy-in and engagement from upper and middle management. Even if most of them do buy in, there’s always at least one Management person or team who drags their feet on the whole process. 

The key to getting engagement from management is to show in your business case the direct ties in NPS benefits to their own departmental  goals and targets. It’s necessary to prove this through presenting clear related calculations on cost, return on investment and revenue. 

Deficient or efficient measure?

As with any popularised program created to measure social behaviour, there’s also been research done to prove that it doesn’t work. One such paper ‘Measurement Deficiencies in the Net Promoter Score’  struggles through trying to empirically understand how NPS works and through a lack of understanding, attempts to prove that it doesn’t work. 

But is this really a good way to disprove something? We don’t all know how gravity works but we know that it does. 

Research: the for and against list 

Net Promoter Score has been tried and tested by many successful businesses around the world. Plenty of research has been done on it and it can be tricky to get to the research that’s going to add value to your own knowledge. I’ve compiled some of the best there is out there for and against NPS. Here it is. 

Do Net Promoters tell us anything? 

Besides giving you a number that tells you how loyal your customer base are, is there anything else useful that Promoters can tell you? Alongside the question which asks ‘on a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to your friends?’you need to assign qualitative and quantative questions to understand the context of the score that is given. 

Without this question, too many assumptions need to be made from your numbered score to get anything actionable for your business. Our surveys not only measures customer loyalty for our clients but also includes a range of customer loyalty driver attributes that provides quantitative and qualitative data. This data allows our clients to improve their business in ways that will directly improve their customer relationships. 

What’s not wrong with Net Promoter Score

Augustine Fou published a piece called ‘What’s Wrong with the Net Promoter Score’ which received a lot of negative comments, likely because there were a lot of errors and poor assumptions made about the customer feedback program. 

Although there are many things wrong about this paper, I want to tackle three main points. Firstly, that NPS doesn’t tell me anything new, secondly, that it is based on flawed maths, and last that the data produced from an NPS program is not actionable. Find out why all three of these points are just plain wrong.