Three wins:

• While a respected and very productive design contractor gave notice, she had a lot of nice things to say about the team, company, and my management of the team. I’m sorry to see her go, but I feel pretty good about what I’ve been doing.
• I had a great workout on Tuesday, but that night thought maybe I had injured myself. I had pushed hard, and while I felt good right after the workout about ninety minutes later I had knee pain, enough to have difficulty sleeping. But whatever it was dissipated very quickly, and by Thursday I was ready and able to have another great workout. I’m cautious, but expecting that this weekend things will be even better. A happy side effect is that I regained a little bit more knee flexion range than I expected.
• I managed to work some bonus content into my presentation about NPS results, relating complaints in NPS comments to a similar signal in support tickets. I also completed that presentation a little sooner than I had planned. I haven’t presented yet, but I’m optimistic. I feel good about what I’m about to do.

Five(!) wins for this week. It pays to think about what good is happening:

1. After buying some cheap running shoes ($70, about as cheap as they had that felt good) I went for a run again. I hated it, but only a little bit, mainly at first, and much less that I would have had I not been wearing proper shoes. I’m four runs in and can see this as a possible “thing I do.” Between lifting three times a week, walking sevenish times a week, and running threeish times a week I’m getting a fair amount of exercise now.
2. My knee flexion has improved to the point that I can do a Turkish get-up on either side without cheating. That’s a nice improvement.
3. One of my mentees has progressed from “how do I convince my boss to let me do what I want” to “how do I communicate about this issue so we can have a productive discussion,” which is a critical change. I’m proud of them!
4. Upheaval in a product has given that product manager and one of the designers I support to do some real live user research, and they are so excited by what they are learning that it seems like to significantly help the product and strengthen informed collaboration on the team. I’m proud of them!
5. There was disconcert in a different product team, and I’ve helped address it mostly by pushing the designer and product owner together, and encouraging the two of them to pull the tech lead in to their discussions. I’m not sure how that team became so disconnected, but it hurt, and we’re meeting with some success undoing that. Everyone involved has so far been able to set aside whatever ill will had emerged. I’m proud of them!

Never mind the distractions, these are nice results.

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.

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.

How NPS Works

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?

Common Misunderstandings

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.

The Real Problems with NPS

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. 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.