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by giovannibajo1
3101 days ago
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My feeling about NPS has always been that the very wide pointing system polarizes users towards the two extremes; most people aren’t analytical and they don’t build up a mathematical way to objectively come up with a number between 0 and 10. They would instinctively vote 10 if they’re happy, 0 if they’re angry, and something in the middle if they’re not fully satisfied. The way they map partial satisfaction to a number is unscientific, and this is why NPS only rewards perfect scores (9 or 10). Similar findings were made by Google with the YouTube rating system that was switched from 1 to 5 stars to a simple upvote/downvote after realizing that most users are polarizing towards the extremes: https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/youtube-comes-to-a-5-star-... |
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To be fair, everything I've read about NPS says don't use it in isolation. The article covers this with the "why?" question. You need to follow up with more detailed questions to get any real benefit from it. But that reduces the survey to a simple tool for flushing out your unhappy users. It gets more complicated because, like unhappy families, everyone is unhappy in their own way.
Some additional things that muddy the waters:
1. Cultural fit - not giving a good score in seen as impolite. As a result you have to be pretty, damned unhappy before considering anything else. When you're users have reached that point you've probably lost them regardless of what you do.
2. Time of use - new users will be enthusiastic and give good scores because new users are enthusiastic and give good scores. By the time they have used the platform for long enough to make a valuable contribution they have generally lost the will to tell you in detail why your product is great or sucks.
2. Sample size, sample size, sample size. The math here is not precise but it's precise enough to tell you if your sample size is too small. The main effect of too small a sample size is the variation in the score is so great it is impossible to infer anything and you may as well abandon the approach lest you end up chasing shadows trying to make something better.
3. Internal use - simply don't do this - ever. There's a vast amount of politicking and employee uneasiness associated with this. Nothing is ever anonymous no matter what is said publicly.
So, in the absence of anything else NPS is probably a reasonable measure if only to generate a conversation internally and for trying to gauge whether your efforts are moving the needle and in which direction.