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by sokoloff 1638 days ago
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.
2 comments

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.

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.