It’s time to kill the net promoter score

by. Ron Shevlin

Management ideas come and go.

Unless we’re talking about the net promoter score, which has come, but hasn’t left. It’s the cockroach of management metrics.

For the life of me, I can’t understand the continued interest in this metric, or as some delusional people call it, a system.

Intention to do anything — let alone to recommend a company one does business with, is useless.

Go ahead, tell your senior management team that, on a scale of 1 to 10, that your intention to increase revenues and profitability this year was a 10. Unless you actually grew revenue and profitability, don’t hold your breath waiting for a good bonus.

But it’s easy to understand and inexpensive to implement, according to net promoter groupies. 

Go to hell. That’s pretty easy to understand, too. Not very helpful in actually getting you there, though. Utility — how helpful a metric is at helping make management decisions — is the criteria for implementing a management metric, not how cheap it is to implement, or how simple the definition.

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