[viridian]

The problem is that if I'm giving a company a 5 or a 6, I probably just sort of tolerate the company in lieu of reasonable competitors, ie McDonalds being the only quick food anywhere near where I work. If I'm giving a company a zero it means I hate them and have a strong desire to see them go out of business (ie Google), and will also help with any endeavor to speed that along if it's easy for me. There's a massive difference between those two.

[wpietri]

I get that, and maybe that's now it works for everybody. There's certainly a massive difference in feeling; maybe that really does translate to a big difference in an individual's behavior. But does that translate to much of a difference in terms of word-of-mouth growth? There I'm not so sure.

Even if it did, though, it's not clear to me that there's much difference in the utility of the NPS metric. Are companies with a lot of zeroes also companies that are sincerely seeking to improve? Would a more complex scoring system motivate more change? If so, does the benefit gained outweigh the extent to which the added complexity harms NPS adoption elsewhere?

In practice, if some company had an unusually high number of zeros relative to sixes and were very serious about change and the metric didn't shift much when a bunch of people moved from zero to six, you can bet that someone would explain this in a meeting and everybody would still be excited. So although I get that this would be a problem if NPS were the only number used, I'm just not persuaded that some sort of NPS++ metric would be any better in actual use.