Why Net Promoter Score (NPS) is Like a Headache: You Know It’s There, But Good Luck Finding the Cause!
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re sitting at your desk, happily plugging away at your work, when—bam!—you feel it: a headache starts creeping up on you. It’s not a gentle tap on the shoulder; it’s that all-too-familiar, pounding pressure right behind your eyes, like a tiny drummer trying to practice his solos inside your head.
You know exactly what it is. Headache. You’ve had them before. You don’t need an X-ray to diagnose it. But here's the thing: you’re not sure why it’s there. Did I sleep wrong? Is it the three cups of coffee I had before noon? Or is it just the sheer weight of another meeting about the meeting?
This is where Net Promoter Score (NPS) comes into play. Think of NPS as your first instinctive diagnosis. It’s that clear, single question: "Would you recommend us to a friend or colleague?" Just like recognizing that your headache exists, NPS tells you yes, your customers are either fans, fence-sitters, or they're not feeling the love at all.
But here’s the rub: NPS doesn’t tell you what’s causing the headache. You don’t know if it’s your poor posture, lack of water, or the fact that your project manager just dropped a three-hour meeting invite on your calendar.
To really figure out the cause of your headache, you need to dig deeper into the contributing factors. You’d need to ask:
Did I skip lunch today, leaving my blood sugar in a tailspin?
Am I dehydrated, or did I just ignore that "drink more water" reminder on my phone?
Is my neck tense because I’ve been hunched over my laptop like a contortionist for six hours straight?
Similarly, NPS doesn’t tell you whether your customers are frustrated because the onboarding process is a maze, or if the customer support response time is slower than a dial-up connection. To really get to the bottom of it, you need to look at more actionable metrics:
Feature adoption rates (Are they using the features you think they should?)
Support tickets (What are they asking about over and over again?)
Customer satisfaction surveys (Is something clearly bothering them, like that 3-day delay in receiving an answer?)
Now, NPS is important, just like recognizing you’ve got a headache is important. But it’s a heavy needle to move. If your NPS is low, it's going to take a lot more than an aspirin and a good night's sleep to get it back up. You need to address the real issues—whether that’s fixing the customer journey, improving product usability, or (heaven forbid) offering more empathetic customer support.
And just like you can’t just pop a pill and hope your headache goes away forever, you can’t just tweak your NPS score and expect customer satisfaction to magically improve. You need to treat the root cause. Fixing the underlying problems with your SaaS solution (or that nagging neck strain) will lead to a more sustainable improvement in both your customers' experiences and their likelihood to recommend your product.
So the next time you check your NPS score and it’s as low as your energy levels after that third cup of coffee, remember: It’s like knowing you’ve got a headache. Now, go figure out what’s causing it—before you reach for another painkiller (or worse, another pointless meeting). It’s better to leave NPS for an in-depth longitudinal tracker than product level, customer engagement, or UX measures.
Sorry #Bain and Company! I know NPS is your bread and butter, and that Harvard Business Review made your invented metric a global sensation in the market research industry, but it’s a bit overrated, and giving organizations headaches when trying to use this nebulous rating to identify root causes and actionable measures that can truly drive success.
