The NPS Is Dead – How we killed it with Incentives

I suppose most people in IT have encountered the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in some form. If you’re unfamiliar with it, just check out the Wikipedia article.

In brief, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction. It’s calculated by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or service on a scale from 0 to 10. The score is then derived by subtracting the percentage of detractors (those who score 0-6) from the percentage of promoters (those who score 9-10).

It sounds good, and for a time, it served its original purpose well!

However, at some point, companies and management realized it could be used to measure employee performance, and they began incentivizing people based on the NPS, either positively or negatively.

This is when things started to go downhill. Suddenly, it was no longer about improving the product. The main objective became simply increasing the NPS to secure the incentive. People aren’t foolish – they’re inventive, especially when incentives are involved.

It’s almost comical how the 1-10 scale has been misused to skew the results. I’ve seen feedback forms color-coding the scale with 9 and 10 in green (sometimes 7 and 8 in yellow) and marking the rest in red. It get’s even more obscure when people are literally instructed on what to choose: Recently, a colleague came back from vacation and shared a story about attending a guided tour. At the end, he was asked to rate the experience, and the organizer said, “Hey, this is a new kind of rating system. If you liked the event, you have to give a 9 or 10 – anything else doesn’t count. Please, give us a 9 or 10.” – I mean … come on.

So, what effect has this had? Well, naturally, we’ve caught on. Now, everyone who understands how the NPS works is skewing the results. Whenever I see a customer feedback scale of 0-10, I KNOW the game. In my head, I automatically reduce it to a binary scale: 0 or 10. Why even bother with the numbers in between?

Luckily, not everyone is aware of the NPS, yet. But the question remains: is there any hope for change? Can we move away from a system that’s so easily manipulated, or are we stuck with it for the foreseeable future? While simplifying ratings might seem like a solution, it’s unlikely that companies will abandon the NPS anytime soon. The system has become deeply ingrained in performance metrics and corporate culture. Unfortunately, unless there’s a major shift in how businesses measure success and value feedback, the focus will remain on boosting scores rather than improving experiences. So, for now, it seems we’re stuck playing the NPS game.