[actually_a_dog]

I suspect the concept of NPS is, if not the source of, a major driver of the whole "anything less than 10/10, 5 stars, etc. is basically a fail" meme. There seem to be signifiant toxic effects from this on customer-facing employees, in my experience.

[xraystyle]

This is absolutely a massive issue with it. Apple did this with retail employees back in the day and it was terrible. Employee reviews were based on it, managers had to call customers and apologize if the customer didn't leave a 9 or 10 rating, it was absolutely awful.

One of the biggest problems with it is that an average person, unaware of what NPS is, doesn't understand that giving any rating less than a 9 is essentially giving a rating of zero.

If I have what I would consider to be an average interaction with a business, e.g. I just buy something and leave, no need for support, no problems to deal with, etc., that seems average to me. Based on a non-NPS understanding of a 0-10 scale, I'd say that's what, a 7? But the business now considers this as a failure on the part of the person that helped me at that store.

This is why sales people and phone reps are constantly now asking you to give them a 10/10 rating if you receive a survey, because even if they literally just took your money and handed you change, their jobs depend on you acting as if you had a heart attack and they saved your life by performing CPR or something.

It's honestly a terrible system that produces no meaningful feedback for the company and causes employees to do whatever they can to game the numbers. All you're measuring with NPS is how good your employees are at juking the stats, nothing more.

[5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E]

I remember when I worked my first job as tech support for an ISP our entire performance was measured by NPS. The company had a question asking 'how would you rate the rep' and 'how would you rate the company'. But, the rep question was a decoy, and the company question actually counted in my personal NPS stats.

I would get so many 10s for the rep (which does not count at all) and 1s for the company which would obliterate my stats. And, only the last person who spoke to the customer was rated, so this encouraged meaninglessly transferring people around like a hot potato.

Number of times I would get a customer who had issues for weeks, and then I take a look at their issue, resolve it in 15 minutes, they would be ecstatic on the call and then the NPS survey comes back, 10 for me and 1 for the company. Then I would get a tap on my shoulder from the supervisor asking me to explain the detractor.

I almost got fired after about 6 months due to my NPS being too low, until I made friends with one of the vets, and one evening in the pub with couple beers too many in him he explained to me that the only way to survive is to game the system. He told me how to crash the call client to prevent it from sending surveys to angry callers, how to transfer people to infinite hold queue which does not result in survey when they hang up, and how to trick the system into thinking that I had and inbound call when I did not (which gave me time to actually do my work, like performing relocations and resolving complex provisioning issues since any time not spent on inbound call was considered to be not adhering to schedule). I went from less than +40 NPS to +90 NPS in one month, so most of the NPS feedback was fake anyway.

[LordAtlas]

Damn, this sounds like the definition of "evil".

[sixdimensional]

This, to me, is a general problem with a purely quantified, metrics driven approach to management, not just limited to NPS. I'm not demonizing these approaches, just saying that you have to balance humanity with data.

I like to look at this kind of thing as the one of the dark sides/dark patterns of using data for decisionmaking.

Qualitative measures are important, as is maintaining as much humanity as possible, to have a balanced and healthy culture. Being solely metrics/data driven can lead to cold, heartless, damaging culture (might be efficient or make profit, but very dehumanizing).

[afarrell]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

“The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.”

[actually_a_dog]

Related is Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

My favorite story related to this, because the managers thought LoC would be a good measure of productivity, is "-2000 lines of code": https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

[sixdimensional]

Thank you for this very interesting share, I had not heard of this before!

[erik_seaberg]

Most internal surveys at my company use a scale of 1 to 6, where 1=4 and 5=6. Our managers can’t even see an improvement from “terrible” to “fairly decent” in the underlying distribution.

Sometimes they require writing something to justify a bad score (but not a good score!)

[jldugger]

> giving any rating less than a 9 is essentially giving a rating of zero.

Well, at least its not a negative number!

[actually_a_dog]

If you convert it to IEEE 754, it could be -0. ;)