You've Ruined Online Ratings

"Do you think I should lose my job over the way I drove you here? If no, please rate me 5 stars."

This also now transfers to NPS surveys. I used to work at an ISP and I often take the time out to rate customer service providers as I know how important metrics can be to individual workers. A lot of companies doing NPS are now "stuffing" the rating system by telling people "Please rate us on a scale of 1 - 10 where 9 or 10 means you're happy". Yes, 9 - 10 means happy, not ecstatic, not over the moon, just happy. If you rate an 8? Well you must not be happy, what did we do wrong to deserve an 8/10?

That is to say, a lot of companies say they are doing it. Middle managers will profess to their upper management overlords that they are doing it, but very few companies are actually doing it.

NPS was built around a key metric which is "how likely someone is going to be to recommend your service to someone else". The P stands for "promoter" and a promoter is exactly that.

If you start stuffing the by asking the wrong questions, priming responses, etc. then your NPS score becomes meaningless, a 9/10 or 10/10 no longer means that person is necessarily going to be a promoter! For now, it's a numbers game so I think the upper management don't care that their 9s and 10s don't translate to actual promoters, because they'll get their bonuses, or they'll get acquired by a bigger firm based on those "fake" numbers.

Soon enough, I think we'll see a revolt from the smarter firms doing due diligence where it's not enough to show a high NPS score, you will also need to prove that these numbers are reliable (better yet, simply show that you're getting new customers through word of mouth by some other, verifiable means).