An increasing number of B2B SaaS companies have started taking feedback seriously and in doing so have turned to NPS (Net Promoter Score) as a way of gathering information.

While it’s great that so many companies are realizing the value of product feedback, NPS only offers one tiny slice of information that can sometimes lead you in the wrong direction.

NPS has some major flaws that, if left unaddressed, will cause you problems down the line.

Here’s where NPS leaves you with gaps in your approach to product feedback…

1 — A Lack of Information

The NPS gives you a number that effectively tells you if your net score is positive (good) or negative (bad). The higher the score, the better you’re doing.

You can also ask follow-up questions. This is usually an open-ended question simply asking why the user gave their score.

At first glance, this might seem like a good way of collecting feedback. The user can tell you what they like and dislike about the product, and air any grievances they might have.

The trouble with this is that it’s not very specific. Even if the user takes the time to answer this question in-depth (though many won’t) the information they provide won’t be useful.

Imagine if you gave a score of 7 on an NPS survey, and you were then asked “Why?”. What would you say? If it was me, I’d probably write the first positives that come to mind, and balance it with a negative point or two. I might talk about the UI, or the Customer Success, or the content on their blog. I’d probably go off on tangents. I suspect you’d do the same.

Now imagine a poor Product Manager who is tasked with parsing these answers for useful information. They’re going to have to read through all these responses trying to find any genuinely useful parts. I wouldn’t want that job.

Instead, you need to ask detailed questions, based on why you’re collecting feedback.

In this case, we’re talking about product feedback, so you really just want information about the product. You probably also want to learn about the problems that your users are facing.

So why not ask them?

Simply set up a survey on Typeform/Survey Monkey/Google Forms and ask the following questions:

1. Do you face any problems with the product?
2. If yes, how do you currently solve them?
3. How important is this to you?

Your users can then provide all the information your Product team needs to start coming up with fixes and improvements. Adding a little structure goes a long way. Let your product teams design the questions to get the information they need.

2 — A Lack of Foresight

You would think that one of the key reasons for utilizing NPS would be that it predicts the lifetime of a customer.

If customers who gave low scores were more likely to churn, then that would be a great asset for Customer Success teams to have at their disposal.

Unfortunately, a review written by Schneider and Berent, et al. found that there are several studies which bring into question the predictive validity of NPS, and others still which have found alternative methods of feedback collection are a better indicator.

This suggests that NPS doesn’t particularly help CS teams figure out which customers need the most help.

Perhaps a better way of doing that would be to create your own customer health score, based on the current behavior of your users, and definitions you have put in place on what a successful customer would be.

This health score can then flag up any potential churn so you can actively work to prevent it.

(Our podcast with Rachel Jennings of Assignar explains this in more detail.)

3 — A Lack of Incentive

Even if NPS was perfectly valid, and gave you all the information you required, there’s still a large, looming question:

“Why would your users care enough to fill it out?”

We’re all busy, and the last thing we want to be doing is filling in forms and surveys when we could be getting stuff done.

I don’t know about you but whenever I see a company asking me to fill in a quick survey, I always wonder what’s in it for me?

Most of the time, the answer is a resounding “nothing” and so I don’t bother providing feedback.

It’s hard for users to understand how them filling in an NPS survey will help them. Perhaps some of your users don’t even know what NPS is.

This is why it’s important to be specific, much like I mentioned in the first point.

By asking specific questions, about the product, about your marketing, about your help docs, you’re making it easier for your users to understand the value of it.

You’re providing an incentive.

If you ask about the product, the user realizes that their feedback will be used to improve the product. If you ask about marketing, they know you’ll use that to improve your marketing.

You can also create a Product Feedback Policy (PFP) that helps to explain how you deal with their feedback, and set any expectations from the start.

Without an incentive, why would your users bother?

So, What Next?

As you can hopefully see, NPS has some severe limitations. If you exclusively rely on it for your feedback, then you’re ultimately going to lose out on a wealth of information.

Don’t just implement an NPS survey and think that you’ve successfully started collecting feedback. It doesn’t work like that.

Instead, tailor the way you gather and manage feedback to the information you’re trying to collect. If you want product feedback, put a product feedback process in place.

NPS might be useful, but it’s only part of the equation. If you really insist on using NPS, at least provide other avenues of feedback to fill in the gaps.

[This article was originally posted over on our site.]

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