NPS is dead! It’s time to transition to CSAT & microsurveys

In 2003, Bain & Company, came up with a new, standardized method to measure customer loyalty, which offered also the promise to compare results with peers from the industry. That metric was the Net Promoter Score or NPS.

The challenge with NPS is that it was very relevant to its time.

But if we think about the changes in markets, consumer behavior, technology and consumption, a lot has changed in the past twenty years.

Facebook didn’t exist in 2003 , SaaS was pretty much just one company, SalesForce, and AI wasn’t really a thing.

Is it even relevant to measure customer loyalty with a method that was designed when current prevailing digital products weren’t around?

I don’t think so.

Why is NPS Dead

I recently saw an interview with Judd Antin who was the Head of Research at Airbnb and a research manager at Facebook.

Judd noted, quite precisely how the research community treats NPS when he stated the reason as to why it’s no longer an effective measuring tool.

1. It’s too large of a scale — A 0–11 scale is far too wide to measure user sentiments as research shows that effective score cards typically perform accurately in a scale of five.
2. It’s usually unlabeled — Meaning the right context is missing. Products and users have layers to them and a single, non label metric can not unlayer and expose true user sentiments.
3. It’s bad on mobile — On a mobile experience, in many cases you can’t even see the full NPS scale above the fold

To add to Judd’s notes, I believe that NPS has one other major flaw. Even if it may be presented to a customer at the right point in time, it never serves product teams and user research teams the insight they need to create better products.

A NPS distribution can tell you that out of 100 customers you have 20 promoters, 70 detractors and 10 in the middle of the range.

Great, now what?

The Rise of CSAT Microsurveys

To truly uncover user sentiments, we must transition to a method of highly engaging, ultra insightful research that is aligned with today’s common user personalities.

We must transition to customer satisfaction score (CSAT) distributed in microsurveys.

Microsurveys are a powerful tool for a few reasons:

1. Swipe mindset — In a culture of hyper swiping and low attention span, micro surveys enable user to provide snappy, direct feedback to express their sentiments.
2. Sequencing — Because each question is short, it enables the build up of follow up questions without making the survey experience feel so daunting. Let’s face it, no customer today wants to sit around and commit to a 100 questions survey.
3. Scenario Driven — The right microsurveys technology can auto adjust questions to tap deeper onto a certain sentiment and get the in depth insight needed in a short period of time.

How to run Microsurvey the Right Way

Tip #1 — Timing is Key

Target your microsurvey to the precise moment the user finished a task. That way, the context of the survey, the appetite to complete it and as a result the conversion will be high and insightful

Tip #2 Design the Mobile Survey Experience

Remember what we said about mobile and NPS? Well, CSAT microsurveys are the ultimate answer to a mobile experience. They are short and can be designed to be quick and engaging as if it was a dating app.

Tip #3 Make it interactive!

Power up your microsurveys with emojis and images. It makes the survey experience feel more interactive. More so, keep it aligned with your branding and make the survey feel like it’s part of the brand experience.

Surveys today like NPS feel like an out of product experience. It makes the entire feedback gathering experience unnecessarily formal and therefore not engaging.

Final Thoughts

NPS is like books in a library. It was great once, but there is a better way to get the learning you need these days. When designing your research, think of it as product market fit: you have to have research market fit as well as transition to survey methods that fit today’s customers.

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