The Limitations of Nps for Customer Experience

Your NPS scores are lying to you. They're now the intrusive voices inside the head of company leadership. They're not lying because NPS scores are hard to collect, but because they’re based on the flawed idea that we humans can predict our future behavior (NPS scores are flawed for a number of other reasons, but this is the biggest one). Humans are absolute GARBAGE at accurately predicting our future behavior. Don't believe me? If we were good at predicting our future behavior, we'd all still be in the gym getting swole and crushing our New Year's resolutions.😉 Customers saying they *might* recommend your product is not the same as actually doing it. Especially in a world where trust is earned at a snail's pace, attention is scarce, and social capital is becoming more valuable and harder to earn. "Well, we use CSAT scores." Cool, let's talk about it. Even CSAT has its limitations. It captures how someone felt in that *moment* as they reflect on their experience, not whether they’d risk their reputation on referring you to someone they respect. Customer actions > words. If you really want to understand satisfaction and loyalty, ask your customers a better question: “Have you referred us to a friend/family member/colleague?” And then ask the follow-up: “What did you tell them about us?” That one question tells you: → If they’re advocating for you → How they describe the value your product gives to them → Why they believe (or don’t) in what you offer → It also offers solid clues to your differentiated value vs. your competition Whether they say yes or no, the nuance and words contained in their “why” gives you something NPS never will: ✨Insight you can actually act on.✨ Stop chasing a vanity metric just because your boss or the board thinks it's the best and easiest measure of perceived customer value. Start measuring what your customers are really DOING when it comes to satisfaction and referrals. Need help figuring this out? Shoot me a DM and we can chat about gathering and quantifying the buying criteria YOUR customers use when they choose you over your competition.

Rethinking NPS: Measuring Customer Experience with Caution We all want to understand how positive customer experience drives future revenue — and one of the most commonly used metrics for this is Net Promoter Score (NPS). While NPS offers a simple and scalable way to gauge customer sentiment, it’s far from perfect. Critics have pointed out several limitations: 🔍 Lacks diagnostic value 📉 Over-simplifies customer sentiment 🔄 Assumes ‘recommendation’ = loyalty or growth 🎯 Susceptible to bias 🌍 Influenced by cultural and industry differences 📊 Often misused as a performance metric ⚙️ Plagued by inconsistent methodologies Use NPS carefully. It can be a helpful directional indicator — but not the whole story. To truly understand your customers and improve their experience, combine NPS with: ✅ Qualitative feedback ✅ Journey-level insights ✅ Operational and behavioral data Customer experience is complex. Let’s measure it with the depth it deserves. #CustomerExperience #NPS #CXStrategy #Growth #CustomerInsights #Marketing #Leadership

"On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this course to a friend or colleague?" - 0/5. Can we PLEASE stop asking this question? Here's why: - If you don't plan to take action on the data you gain, you wasted my time and your time (averaging, analyzing, dashboarding, etc.). - If you DO plan to take action on the data, read on. NPS is a trade-off. Easy to implement, simple to answer. The challenge is understanding what it means. Even for marketing, let alone training... - First, the question is ridiculous for a course. Tell me how many times you got home from work (or from the basement office) brimming with enthusiasm to recommend a course to your friends? Colleagues? Maybe. Friends and family, never. - Second, the 0 - 10 scale was created for NPS to measure loyalty without specifically asking about loyalty. Loyalty is important when there is a choice. Competitors. Recommendation of a brand or discouraging of another! I mean, do you ever wonder how loyal you are to your L&D department? Let's say another group from operations puts out a similar "course" but boiled down to your role, your skills, and your task. Not learning ABOUT x but learning how to do your job with x. Would you stay loyal to the generic L&D course because you picked 9 or 10 before? Speaking of action... Intention is not action! "[...]in a study of 16,000 consumers showed only about half the people who expressed an intention to recommend specific firms actually did so."  https://lnkd.in/emxK3nDD - Third, and this is important: generally, people will not trash your work. We know the limitations of our workplace, the "do more with less" approach, etc. So you will not get too many distractors unless you really really messed up. NPS focuses on winners and losers (promoters and distractors). Your most important group is the in the middle: those with 7 and 8 who could have gotten more out of the course. That's where you can make a difference next time if you adjust your design, strategy, etc. - Fourth: "but this is just a piece in the puzzle" argument: that's completely fine. I heard this over and over again about the smilesheet data as well. "This is just one of the components we're measuring." One piece of the puzzle. Again, that argument can be completely legit. IF there's more. Because the value of a course, again, is NOT the course content and its completion. It's what you do with what you learned (if you learned anything) on the job. It's the application. It's what happens AFTER any learning (if you needed that course at all). How much of that are you measuring for the big picture? And so, I can't answer this NPS question about my "Colleagues" because I would answer it differently based on their individual roles, knowledge, skills levels, etc. Are you using NPS? If not, what do you do instead? How are you measuring success of your programs? I've run out of characters... #data #training #measurement #NPS #learning

If I could eliminate one widely accepted practice in customer experience, it would be this: Our obsession with vanity metrics. Net Promoter Score Average Handle Time Service Levels. Here's the problem: These metrics tell part of the story, but they're not THE story. They're disconnected from actual business outcomes. Example: Your service levels hit 85% (answering 85% of calls in 20 seconds). Great! But did you: → Sell more? → Resolve more problems? → Increase customer lifetime value? → Reduce churn? You don't know. NPS asks "How likely are you to recommend us?" But there's no correlation between a high NPS score and whether that customer will actually buy again or remain loyal. It's a feeling in the moment, not a predictor of future behavior. What should we measure instead? Metrics connected to business outcomes: → Sales and retention rates → Problem resolution (did we actually fix it?) → Customer lifetime value → Effort of escalation (can customers easily get help when needed?) Too many CX initiatives fail because they cost too much money without generating measurable business benefits. They don't reduce costs. They don't increase sales. They don't extend customer loyalty. They just... cost money. The bottom line: Vanity metrics create a false sense of success while the business suffers. Measure what matters to the business, not what makes us feel good about our performance.

I used to think I was measuring customer loyalty the right way. Every quarter, I’d report out our NPS score, and every quarter, I’d get the same pushback from leadership: “If our NPS is so high, why are sales down?” “If customers love us, why is churn up?” And honestly? I didn’t have a good answer. I felt dejected as I could feel my credibility and social capital with the execs slip away. I was stuck in the CX trap of measuring advocacy, not behavior. NPS told me customers said they’d recommend us—but it told me nothing about whether they’d actually buy from us again. The lightbulb moment came when I stopped chasing how much customers liked us and started tracking how much they actually spent. That’s when I realized: Loyalty isn’t a feeling. It’s a behavior. So, I pivoted. Instead of leading with NPS, I built our CX strategy around three core metrics that actually predict revenue: 🔺 Likelihood to Purchase Again (Intent) – Are they signaling they’ll come back? 🔺 Repeat Purchase Rate (Behavioral) – Are they actually returning? 🔺 Time to Repeat Purchase (Behavioral) – How long does it take? And guess what happened? 💡 Our CX efforts finally had credibility in the boardroom. When we improved post-purchase experience, I could prove it led to faster repeat purchases. 💡 Marketing and Finance finally saw CX as a growth lever. Instead of reporting on ‘customer happiness,’ I was driving revenue conversations. 💡 We made better investments. Instead of obsessing over ‘improving NPS,’ we focused on shortening the time to second purchase—and sales shot up. The reality is: NPS won’t save you when revenue is down. If you want to be taken seriously as a CX leader, you have to connect the dots between emotion, intent, and action. It’s time to stop measuring how much customers like you and start measuring how much they buy from you. If you’ve had this realization too, let’s talk. Let’s get your CX unf*cked.

Most companies don’t use NPS to improve CX. They use it to feel better about not improving it. NPS is not the goal. It’s a tool. But somewhere along the way, we forgot that. We started treating NPS like a KPI to hit, not a signal to learn from. We built dashboards instead of systems. We optimized survey response rates—while customers churned in silence. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The moment your teams start managing the score instead of improving the experience, your system is broken. I’ve seen it too many times: Surveys sent only to happy users. Frontline teams coached to avoid negative scores. Customer issues “closed” in the CRM—but still unresolved in reality. This isn’t just a data problem. It’s a trust problem. And Net Promoter was never designed to function in a low-trust loop. The original idea was simple: Build a system where customer feedback can be trusted. Trusted by leaders to guide strategy. By teams, to drive improvement. By customers, to feel heard. But in practice, the feedback loop has become too narrow, too delayed, and too easy to manipulate. That’s where AI changes everything. If applied correctly, and as part of a system...  • It expands the feedback lens, combining support tickets, reviews, chat logs, survey responses  • It contextualizes each signal—tying it to journey stage, segment, and outcome  • It adapts to your priorities; whether you’re fighting churn, optimizing cost, or growing advocacy  • And most importantly: it closes the loop faster, smarter, and cross-functionally At Birdie AI, we’re not here to “fix NPS.” We’re here to help companies build systems where feedback becomes fuel. Where metrics serve the mission instead of replacing it. Because the real goal isn’t a higher score. It’s a smarter company. One that learns faster, acts sooner, and earns customer love—again and again.

If you're being asked to drive Net Promoter Score [NPS], you're chasing a fallacious metric. Haas School of Business Professor Sara Beckman shared on our latest episode of Finding Our Way her concerns with the tool (edited for clarity): "[NPS] has nothing to do with customer satisfaction. There's no correlation between Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction or increased profit. It's ill-constructed from a statistical point of view. It eliminates 2 of the measures. It's not even a proper average. It’s not an appropriate proxy for understanding, "Are my customers now able to achieve an outcome better than they could before?" What I want is a way to know, "Have I actually helped my customer execute the jobs to be done that I intended them to execute?" (I posted a variant on this yesterday, but it was filled with links and seems to have been algo-suppressed. So keeping it simple and focused here. Links in my first comment.)

I lived it: My customer gave a 10 on an NPS survey and then churned the next renewal cycle. We have likely all learned that a high NPS rating may not be a renewal indicator on its own. Value Enhancement Scores, on the other hand, are what analysts are calling the leading driver for customer retention in 2024 - even above Customer Effort Scores. At Banzai we have started making a shift in the kinds of questions we ask our customers in an attempt to understand what value enhancement activities are leaving a positive impact on them, as well as how effectively our team is at enabling them. At scale, this can be easily done with an evolved NPS strategy. Instead of 'how likely are you to recommend us?' or 'do you plan on renewing?' we are reformatting our approach with our strategic segment to probe into the value received by the customer. Examples: "After purchasing the product, I can report a positive impact to my benchmarks" "After accessing the LMS, I feel more confident in my ability to use the product" "After working with my CSM, I am able to achieve more with the product" I'd love to hear how others are asking their customers the right questions to predict, prevent, and mitigate churn in a contemporary way. And as always - don't take my word for it! A link to my favorite analyst-approved VES resource is in the comments. #customerexperience #NPS

I was chatting to the CEO of a very successful retail chain yesterday about their plans with TruRating, and we got onto the topic of NPS (Net Promoter Score - the ‘what’s your likelihood to recommend us to a friend’ question 💬).     "We’ve been measuring NPS for years - it’s been our key customer metric. But we never could really take action on it. We knew where we were trending as an overall business but were always at a loss as to how to really drive change.    We knew our real impact on customer experience was in the store - but the % of customers feeding back on NPS from this channel was so small you couldn’t gauge with any confidence as to whether a particular store team were actually doing well."   I personally love NPS for the simplicity. For being respectful of customers' time and getting a quick litmus test in favor of the business. One of the questions we always have in rotation is an NPS question - and we’ve asked it 10s of millions of times.    But - what we’ve seen from our over 600m responses is that NPS is a pretty blunt tool. There are far more accurate predictors of customer loyalty and spend in the moment, which can still be summarized into a lighthouse question (or selection of questions on rotation with TruRating). These will differ depending on your vertical, customer base, etc.    We find that pretty soon, after going live with TruRating, retailers move on from NPS and get far more nuanced and action-orientated. All part of the customer experience journey. 💙 _ #NPS #customerexperience #customerfeedback

Goodhart's Law should - but doesn't - give #CX Teams pause when they set targets for their CX Metrics. Scores have become an obsession. What can be done? 🎯Goodhart's Law roughly states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. 📈In practice, when you take a metric like #NetPromoterScore, and create a target #NPS number you want to hit, say 50, then NPS stops being a good measure of your #customerexperience. Why is this the case? Because everyone stops focusing on creating better customer experiences and starts focusing on getting higher Net Promoter Scores so they can get to 50. 🔢Numbers obsession. We have all experienced this in our own lives. 🤝 Being coached by employees about what scores to give them on the feedback survey being the most common example. Why are they doing this? Because they have a score target that they personally, or their team, or their company wants to hit. When they tell you what score to give on the survey, they’re revealing that they care more about the score than your experience as their customer. It is frustrating when employees do this, but it's not their fault. Their bonus, or their performance evaluation depends on the score. And so they are compelled to prioritize their livelihood over your experience. That is Goodhart’s Law in action. The tragedy is that now all of your CX scores are questionable. 📉Worst of all, if you are manipulating your scores, or your employees are doing it under pressure from the target score, you won’t even notice that your REAL experience isn't improving, or might even be getting worse. 💡 So remember: Creating better experiences and focusing on increasing your NPS, or other customer metric are not interchangeable. When you focus on NPS, you neglect CX. 💡 What to do instead? Focus on creating the conditions where getting NPS of 50 is more likely. The score is an output of your CX improvements, not the other way around.