[dcposch]

NPS has the advantage of being concrete and simple, producing evenly sampled feedback. This is hard to get any other way.

A proper NPS asks only one question and requires only a single click to answer -- eg "Scale of 1-10 how likely are you to recommend <product> to a friend?" > click [8] > done.

There's a free-text "Tell us more" field that is totally optional.

This means users actually answer it. NPS feedback is the closest I've ever seen to being a clean sample.

By contrast:

- Everyone hates an n-question "would you like to fill out our survey" feedback form. Any data from those is going to be skewed, because only a certain kind of person fills those, and usually only if they're angry enough that they want to vent.

- Feedback from a passive "Submit feedback" button in-app is also skewed. Maybe useful as a bug report mechanism, but it won't tell you what's making your happy users happy.

- Proactively reaching out and talking to/observing users is obviously good, and nothing ever substitutes for that. But you want bulk data, not just anecdotal evidence.

- Most importantly, NPS really shines at telling you what's making your almost-happy users almost-happy. When someone clicks [10] and writes "I love it", that feels great. But when someone clicks [7] and tells you what's annoying them, that's often extremely useful.

- NPS does a great job priming people to give useful feedback. By forcing you to pick a single out-of-10, you just did a quick mental accounting. "9? Nahh, <reason>." Then you click 8 and write the reason.

--

NPS was popularized by that famous HBS study where they found it correlates well with product growth.

I wonder how much of that result is simply because it's one of the least obnoxious ways of sampling user feedback, and therefore produces clean data.

[sokoloff]

In an almost Goodhart’s Law case, now that I know how NPS is used, I answer these questions differently, being far more prone to use 6, 7, or 8 to express my opinion.

[dcposch]

Eh this is a niche issue. I bet less than 1% of people answering NPS have ever heard of "NPS".

The only way this would be a meaningful effect is for a dev tools or similar product where your audience is the HN audience.

[ghaff]

It probably depends on the survey. If I just want to get out the door of the service department at the car dealership I'll probably give a perfect score unless they really screwed something up. I don't want to explain a non-perfect score and probably shouldn't give one so long as the experience was "OK."

On the other hand, like many, I probably tend to follow something like the XKCD star rating levels (https://xkcd.com/1098/) for products. And for employee surveys, I generally answer somewhere in the mildly positive range to most questions.

I'm not sure I've ever answered an NPS survey but, for most companies, I'd probably be somewhere in a similar range, even for companies I'm perfectly fine with most of the time.

The more complex the transactions/products the more reliably you'll have areas of gripe-age. A book or movie is rarely 5 stars for me. A USB cable pretty much works or it doesn't.