Jon Plummer

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a popular and fashionable customer experience metric meant to express the loyalty of a company’s customers. It’s simple to administer, and since it’s in widespread use a company can compare their results to others fairly easily.

The method is fairly simple: once each year, disconnected from any specific sales or customer service interaction, ask each of your registered users on a scale of zero to ten how likely they are to recommend your brand or product to a friend or colleague. If you’re fancy you might also ask why they gave the number that they did.

The method of arriving at a score is also straightforward – subtract the percentage of respondents scoring six or below (detractors) from the percentage of respondents scoring nine or ten (promoters). You now have one number between 100 and –100. If that score is above zero you have more promoters than detractors. A higher NPS score is supposedly correlated with higher sales growth.

What’s not to love?

Like other interesting tools such as brainstorming or Agile, NPS is commonly misunderstood and its practice distorted. People enthusiastic about the idea of NPS press an NPS-like survey into service in all sorts of off-label ways, sowing confusion within their companies. The most common distortions are

• “Once each year…” – It’s common to receive an NPS-like question about this or that more often than yearly, increasing the likelihood that the next distortion will take place.
• “…disconnected from any specific sales or customer service interaction…” – It’s especially common to receive NPS-like questions during or immediately after customer service interaction, sales interactions, etc. These are not NPS, as they are heavily influenced by the quality of a specific interaction.
• “…ask each of your registered users…” – If your users are not your customers, asking about user loyalty will garner different results than asking about customer loyalty.
• “…on a scale of zero to ten…” – This part of the NPS method is rarely violated.
• “…how likely they are to recommend your brand or product to a friend or colleague.” – This part of the NPS method is less commonly violated, but it does happen.

Any one of these deviations would make your NPS-like survey not NPS. And one of them, confusing users with customers in situations where the two are distinct, is likely to produce misleading results.

It sort of sounds like I’m defending NPS, here, much as I would Agile or brainstorming. But I’m not. The real difficulties with NPS, if you manage to avoid the common traps above, are these:

• There’s scant evidence that respondents’ scores on an NPS survey are actually related to their recommendation behavior. This isn’t surprising when we consider that the NPS question “how likely are you to…” is asking that person to speculate about their future behavior, which is much less reliable than asking people to report on their past behavior. “Satisfaction” and “liking” are better predictors of recommendations than “likelihood to recommend.”
• NPS is no better than more direct measures of customer satisfaction at predicting sales growth.
• NPS is not apparently predictive of other behaviors that demonstrate loyalty, such as repeat purchases.

It’s not that you shouldn’t use NPS at all. Just be aware of what it is and what it is not. Listen carefully for the real question behind your organization’s wish to use NPS, and see if that question can be answered more directly.

Three wins for this week:

1. It was less tricky than I feared to come up with four reasonable UX-led programs for the Connect Conference this October. I’m feeling more optimistic about my (and our) responsibilities for this conference than before.
2. The nutrition coach pointed out that I’m slightly underfeeding myself with occasional peaks to try to make up for it. Even with those peaks on average I’m a little below where I should be calorie-wise and well-below where I should be protein-wise. That explains why weight and energy have both been proceeding downward and workouts have been getting harder rather than easier. I now have targets that will help me make better choices.
3. I went for my first run in years, and it wasn’t terrible. I went slow, paid attention to duration but not distance or pace, and tried to take it easy on my knee. I used the Nike Run Club app, since it’s free. I’ll do this a few more times before making a decision about schedule, shoes, etc.

It was a little trickier than I expected to find the wins this week.

Three wins for this week:

1. Never mind my thoughts about NPS, which I have not written up here but should (edit: See “The trouble with NPS“). Our company Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is five. Five is not terrible as it’s above zero, but it’s not something to crow about either. That of my team is eighty. If you’re curious about eNPS, Qualtrics has an okay writeup. Our engagement scores reflect a similar difference, albeit a bit less grand.
2. Workouts this week, while at the same weights and only slightly higher volume than last week, were unexpectedly much harder. I did ’em anyhow. This might have something to do with the third win; while I’ve been losing weight slowly, I’ve also been losing energy slowly.
3. I started with a nutrition coach. I’m in the “write everything down and don’t change anything” phase, prior to recommendations. I’m not jazzed about taking progress photos, but I am excited about having a knowledgeable person help me steer my habits toward my goal of being above average.

Have a good weekend.

Past Belkin colleague Ryan Peterson recently began posting his “weekly wins” on LinkedIn. My impression is that he did this in part to steel his resolve during is (successful!) job search, and in part to begin a practice of positive self-talk. As he put it,

I find it easy to be encouraging and optimistic when talking about others. In the past, however, I have struggled to talk to myself in the same positive way. 

Ryan Peterson, Weekly Wins #1

But recognizing my own wins doesn’t come easily. We use 15Five at work, and each week are asked “what went well last week?” This is the hardest part of my 15Five check in to fill in. Ryan points out,

What I’ve been struggling to overcome when identifying wins is to allow myself to accept a small win, such as getting lunch with my mom. Also just the practice of taking time to write them down is “forcing” me to be reflective. I’m optimistic that as I continue on this path it will become easier to identify my own wins, and I’ll be able to model this for my family at home, and in the workplace.

Ryan Peterson, Weekly Wins #7

Accepting a small win may also be a piece of my challenge.

I have already begin thanking others at work as a weekly practice, one I hope comes across as authentic; with this new practice I hope to foster an accurate feeling of regular accomplishment.

So! Three four wins for this week:

1. I witnessed people on my team enthusiastically collaborating and demonstrating gratitude for each other, suggesting that my effort forming a cohesive team is working.
2. I helped an embattled product time seize the crisis-opportunity created by the diversion of their engineering staff with a solid research plan and a method to capture what they will learn as they prepare for a new take on their product.
3. I had a lovely meeting with someone in People Operations where I got a sneak peek into our culture survey results, lending credence to insights gained by looking at exit interview data.
4. I used Local to transform my slow-as-something-really-slow blog into a speedy static site. I’m not shilling for Local, here; it just seemed like a quick way to make this change.

Same time next week?

A recent correspondent asked how to move his team from “thoughts and fears about plans” to action, and I suggestion making their next intervention a pilot. That way an intervention is an experiment, and can be evaluated, then continued, tweaked, or ended.

I counseled him to consider coaching folks to articulate

• the problem we see
• the result we want
• what we’ll try, for how long
• how we will know if it is working or not
• how we will know if we should stop the pilot early

At the end of the pilot you can evaluate the results and decide to

• continue as-is
• continue with tweaks
• try something else
• stop altogether

with the same five points above for any change or new intervention.

Mathilda asks:

Can you all share how you distinguish product designers from user experience designers? I’ve been trying to determine the differentiation with other UX friends, but it still seems a bit foggy. Some have explained it to me as user experience designers focus on users and usability, and product designers focus on “everything”, i.e. the product and the business. Many of the user experience books and resources I read (Lean UX, Build Better Products, UX Strategy, NNgroup) though seem to frequently connect business outcomes with UX. I’ve also heard the difference explained as product designers having greater visual design specialization, but I’ve seen that in UX designer roles as well. Also, why not hire a visual designer in that situation?

Mathilda in Where are The Black Designers? Slack

It IS foggy, and as usual, I think the term “product designer” was coined to clarify but failed to do so (and introduced conflict with industrial designers among others). I think it mainly comes from poor mutual understanding of the term “UX” and what all a UX designer does or might do in different settings. This varies WIDELY by organization; in general, the larger the org the narrower the role of an individual contributor UX designer and the more the job(s) of working on a specific experience are distributed over multiple people. This narrowing of the role of a UX designer in large organizations has led to folks who do more than “Edward wifreframe-makin’-hands” to adopt the “Product Designer” term.

Here’s what I see as a rough breakdown:

• Graphic: the visual design of things, especially print pieces, marketing collateral, informational websites
• UI: the visual and microinteractive design of web applications, mobile applications, and desktop applications
• UX: the interaction design of web applications, mobile applications, desktop applications, and occasionally embedded or physical interfaces, with an emphasis on arranging the larger requirements and workflows to meet business goals and user needs together, and the research required to do a good job of this (sometimes some of this UX role is split off into a separate Researcher role)
• Product: UX + UI

But companies don’t necessarily follow this, and these terms mean different things to different people, and so it’s always useful to

• when looking for a job
  • be open to multiple titles in your job search
  • look for clues in the job descriptions you are considering
  • explain your capabilities and aptitudes rather than trying to choose a title – use plain English
  • ask questions of your prospective employers about what they mean when they say they want a {whatever} designer and compare their answers to what you want to do (always a good idea anyhow)
• when hiring
  • be thoughtful and consistent with the language you use in your organization
  • explain what you’re really looking for when you write a job description rather than relying on the title
  • eliminate needless qualifications and job requirements from the job description
  • write a job ad that describes daily and regular activities and how these contribute to org success
  • remember that a job description is not a job ad
• when talking within your org
  • be thoughtful and consistent with the language you use in your organization
  • coach managers and leaders to be consistent in this same way, which will require explaining why
  • plan needed capacity and capabilities before settling on roles and titles

How do I get experience doing a thing without a job doing the thing? By doing the thing anyway.

For design or coding there are two good places to start, and you probably should pursue both:

1. How can adding a bit of design or coding enhance your current job? Are there repetitive tasks that might be automated, information that could be brought together into a dashboard, metrics or research that might inform your work or the work of your team, places where quality might be improved through greater understanding or thoughtfulness? You can offer to do things, or just start to do them. You can learn a lot by applying new skills to something you already know about.
2. What parts of coding or design can you try with what you already have, on your own time? I got started in design because I found desktop publishing tools fun to play with in college, and used them to make greeting cards, tee shirts, and to enhance my classwork. Playing with the tools in ways that scratched my own itches taught me skills that I could later apply to my work.

In re point 2 above, my daughter mentioned to me that she might be interested in filmmaking. I told her, “you have a phone, start making some films!” Getting started can be that easy. Your work might not be won’t be very good at first. That’s fine. Keep going unless you find you don’t like the process. Competence will come later.

Starting in management is a little different, but again I see two straightforward paths and it might be worthwhile to pursue both:

1. Offer to help/take ownership of small moments in your job where coordination is needed, process change is needed, or a problem needs to be sorted out. This will give you experience talking to others to learn about a situation, proposing possible approaches, marshaling the effort of others, and delivering a result. This is managing! Managing in small ways leads to success managing in small ways, which leads to larger opportunities. The reward for good work is more work.
2. Volunteer with charitable or vocational organizations and offer to help in ways that are more like 1 above over time.

You can file for time off in the relevant system and I’ll approve it. It is important to give your product team at least as much warning so that you can help them adapt to your absence.

The key things I expect here are:

1. advance warning if at all possible
2. file diligently (well before when warning is possible, right after if not)
3. provide the same level of warning to your team
4. negotiate well in advance with your team what to do to make sure things bowl along in your absence (you have things ready, what slack will others need to take up, what can wait for your return)
5. ask for help if needed
6. negotiate one week in advance with your team what to do to make sure things bowl along in your absence
7. ask for help if needed
8. check on how things went once you return and negotiate the new way forward from there (given that conditions may have changed)
9. ask for help if needed

In general I think of filing for PTO as a “vacation warning” rather than a “vacation request.”

To be a leader planning for one’s firm to be acquired is to be in conflict with oneself: one must both

• proceed as if nothing will change, as there’s no deal until the deal is complete, and
• plan the future in which everything will change, rendering the rod that went into “proceed as if nothing will change” entirely moot.

Along the way, especially if one of the groups (acquirer or acquired) is a publicly-traded firm, one must hide the coming deal from all but the very few people who are involved in accomplishing it. This is necessary and difficult and thankless.

Difficult because you have information that you cannot share that will have a sudden and material effect on the lives of people you’ve supported and come to care about. Difficult because the working of the deal puts an awkward gap in whatever plans you have together, and so you must dodge, delay, make excuses. Difficult because if the deal falls through you’ll have to pick up the pieces and paper over breakage caused by these gaps. Few will know why or what happened, just that you were unaccountably ineffective for a while.

Thankless because when the deal does happen all of your vagueness during the gap will be revealed as lies, lies that people won’t understand, lies that hurt to tell as you told them and hurt again as the people you deceived bark at you for deceiving them. Which you had to do.

Thankless too because any negative consequence of the deal, however indirect, is also on your head. Your reputation among those affected will be harmed. And yet it was probably the right thing to have done, to pursue the acquisition, to draw investment toward the idea that you gathered these people together to work on, or you would not have done it. Sad that the result is pain and resentment and blame.

An employee who comes to your team via an acquisition

• was likely in the dark until the acquisition was announced
• didn’t apply to be part of your company, your team, or for their new job
• is accustomed to working on different things, with different people, toward different goals
• doesn’t know you, or anyone on your team, or your company
• is unaware of your expectations of them
• experiences a loss of the status they enjoyed as a valued employee prior to the acquisition

As a result, they are likely very uncomfortable with the situation. And it’s really not at all fair; they didn’t ask for this to happen. Suddenly they are asked to adapt to a hundred dimensions of unknown.