[bichiliad]

Let me first say that the burden of proof here relies on Fred Reichheld (or whoever else champions NPS now) to defend NPS from the claims in the cited papers.

I totally agree that NPS feels like placing faith too much in something magical. However, I don't feel totally convinced by this article; when people calculate NPS, do they really ignore any other analysis on the raw input (i.e. all 0's vs all 6's)? Yes, there are totally exceptional datasets that make the NPS look like it hasn't move; has that been a problem for people in the wild?

Also, is picking one ecommerce customer out of the data enough to say that there's no correlation between NPS and future behavior?

I've seen NPS used as a way of keeping a pulse on a community; if it drops sharply, something is clearly wrong in a way that normal monitoring can't surface.

[jmspool]

> I've seen NPS used as a way of keeping a pulse on a community; if it drops sharply, something is clearly wrong in a way that normal monitoring can't surface.

If this is your goal (and it's a good goal), there are way better questions than NPS to use here. I'd go with a simple "How did we do today?" question, versus the convoluted NPS mechanism.

[bichiliad]

Yeah, probably. It's the sort of thing where someone's going to want to know your NPS anyways, so if you're collecting that data you may as well break it apart a little. And by no means do I think you shouldn't be doing other sorts of user research.