The Blog

Should you use NPS? It depends, but not on the things most write-ups focus on. Here are the seven genuine strengths of the methodology and the four real weaknesses, with the trade-offs you actually need to make a decision.

Before you spend time and money implementing NPS, the question worth answering is whether it deserves a place in your business at all. The honest answer is yes, but for nine reasons most posts about NPS don't list. Here they are, with the supporting evidence: shareholder value, revenue prediction, organisational loyalty, and a couple that surprise most people.

"We tried Net Promoter and it didn't work." Almost every time someone says that to me, it comes back to a small number of fixable implementation mistakes — no C-level buy-in, treated as market research, no root cause analysis, score collected and nothing done. Here are the seven, and how to correct each one without restarting the program.

Who invented it? What's a good score? Can you do it on a 5-point scale? Every question about NPS the textbooks gloss over, answered in plain English, including the ones that keep getting the wrong answer in LinkedIn posts.

Statistical packages are powerful, expensive and overkill for most customer feedback work. Excel can do almost everything they can do, and it's already on your desktop. Here's a step-by-step walk-through of analysing survey data in Excel, simple stats, error bars, histograms, with a video to follow along to.

There's a recurring critique that NPS doesn't actually measure anything real. It's a fair question, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a defensive one. Here's a pragmatic case for using a methodology that works, even when no one can fully explain why.