NPS—Why Some People Hate It

Some people feel deeply threatened by the growing popularity and acceptance of Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and they have launched campaigns attempting to discredit the concept. Satisfaction-survey firms regularly excoriate NPS supporters in conferences, on web pages, in book reviews, and in blogs. The phrases they use—“NPS is a danger to your company’s profits”; “NPS hinders the building of better customer relationships”; “any statistics student would laugh”; and “NPS is the ultimate bait-and-switch scam” reveal an emotional urgency that transcends the putative logic of their arguments.

One senior airline executive confided that a group of his internal market researchers had banded together to try to “refute the Fred factor” so that senior management would not continue on the path to replacing their old (failed) feedback process with NPS. One satisfaction-survey firm has gone so far as to threaten me with lawsuits and has recruited well-connected friends to pressure me to stop commenting on the weaknesses of traditional satisfaction surveys.

What accounts for this emotional outburst against such a straightforward idea, that companies should systematically measure and manage the number of customer promoters and detractors? At least part of the answer is that many senior executives have long been disenchanted with the traditional satisfaction survey tools but have been reluctant to jettison these tools until they found something better. With NPS, they can envision a solution that is far more practical, and they are itching to get rid of the systems that have failed them. In the words of one Fortune 500 CEO: “NPS is a disruptive technology.” As such, it will create winners and losers—and those losers (including some internal market researchers and lots of satisfaction-survey vendors) will fight fiercely to stall its progress.

But the NPS tide continues to build. More firms are joining the surge every day and defecting from disgruntled survey researchers and vendors. The reason that so many researchers hate NPS is that so many senior line executives love it. To quote the chief operating officer of one of the nation’s leading financial-services firms, explaining why his firm was switching to the NPS framework:

The NPS approach really resonates with me for three reasons: 1) It is practical and action-oriented, 2) It establishes clear accountability, and 3) Front line teams like it—and it is their learning and behavior that really drives our customer experience.