Net promoter score

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Net promoter score
/nɛt prəˈməʊtə skɔː/ (n.)

For to a folysshe demaunde behoueth a folysshe ansuere.

—William Caxton, Aesop’s Fables, 1484

A silly question posed to your whole client base in the forlorn hope it will somehow yield a sensible answer.

Usually taking the form of a survey question along the lines “on a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” the net promoter score is a device intended to measure meaningful client loyalty, the likelihood of client referrals, recommendations, and the potential for repeat business. The aggregate data spinning off an “NPS” question is considered, by the sorts of people who should know better but don’t, as a good proxy for forecasting business grown and the health of one’s brand; “brand” being, in this grim modern existence, everything.

Thus, in our rubbish modern lives, we find ourselves inundated with “NPS” questionnaires for anything from yeast extract to the London Underground. They are at best a second-order derivative and in most cases just a lazy proxy for what they purport to measure. To see that this is so, ask yourself: how seriously do you take the net-promoter questionnaires that flood your inbox every day? Have you, really, ever recommended yeast extract to your friends and family? How about your internet service provider? What about a global corporate trust, agency and escrow services provider? No?

Scope creep

Net promoter methodology is leeching away from the brand value of chocolate bars and is seeping into the management methodology of international financial institutions — weird — and, weirder still, to the performance measurement of their internal functions. Now we of the western liberal elite are surely messed-up, readers, but not so divorced from reality that any of us would honestly recommend to our loved ones our employer’s IT help or HR self-service portal. Or our asset manager, insurance company, debt collection agency, broker-dealer or any of the other modernists behemoths that perpetrate their worst reasonable efforts to clients on a systematic basis.

That these organisations even ask whether their customers would recommend them suggests some kind of survivor bias among respondents: there can be no other explanation than “only the truly sycophantic and ingratiating clients even bother responding to these Net Promoter Score questionnaires”.

How to fight back

It is hard to credit that information surrendered under protest, but yet for free, at the end of a meaningless encounter with customer support can, when aggregated, tell the firm anything about how its customers regard it — surprise surprise, the theory behind the NPS questionnaire is based on pure, dumb correlation — and since the arithmetic behind the NPS calculation is elementary, there is a simple way to banish them from the common currency: consistently vote them down. It is not a question of whether you recommend your favourite epoxy resin to your friends and family — why do you care whether they know that or not? — but whether you want to be bombarded with these stupid questionnaires.

The simple answer is to vote no.

See also

• Human resources