You’ve seen it everywhere. An hour after you’ve checked into a hotel, you get an SMS text message with something like, “How likely would you be to recommend (our very banal hotel) to friends and family?”

Hospital stays.
Florists.
Conferences.
Airlines.

As Abraham Maslow opined, “I suppose it’s tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” That’s about right. If you’re not adept at measurement and conversion or customer return rates, Net Promoter Score (NPS) seems sufficiently simple, yet complex, to get the job done.

Customer loyalty in pharma teams similarly has been measured with NPS for about 8 years now, though I just spoke to someone yesterday at a Digital Pharma conference where I was keynote speaker, who said at a break, “We’re just looking into NPS and what it is, to perhaps measure our digital strategy.”

So, with solemn faces and unflinching belief, program management and marketing teams stand in front of their edifices of measurement-KPI metrics, inclusive of their NPS score, even where NPS doesn’t really apply. Made unnecessarily complex, the NPS has been, by a subjective set of neutral scores and arbitrary interval cutoffs. This lends an air of quantitative mysticism to the outputs, and indeed its users are disciples of a method designed without sufficient construct validity or generalizability to be used everywhere it’s being used.

How likely would you be to recommend this magazine to friends and family on a scale of 0-10? 

Who cares?

No, you can’t have any modicum of confidence about your internal NPS leading to better future performance, or about it leading you to have more reliable friends at industry events, but it’s enticing. Confident-sounding and confidently-portrayed numbers make us believe them-even when they’re just junk.

Protip: There are many measurement and surveying methods, and you shouldn’t have to go it alone. After all, if you needed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, you wouldn’t perform it on yourself, or devise your own treatment plan-there are people who specialize in that. For example, Maritz Research has done analyses of different survey methodologies on outcomes and their relative performances for different needs.

As David Ensing observes about NPS’s utility, “It is also likely that NPS was not the best predictor of growth for each company. [Additionally], while company growth is an important outcome metric, it can be far removed from the customer experience because other factors (e.g., effective marketing, financial management, charismatic leadership, etc.) also affect company growth. Often, a better approach is to define the customer outcome variable you are most interested in affecting (e.g., customer advocacy, transactional customer satisfaction, repeat purchasing, etc.) and conduct linkage analysis to determine the best and most important predictors of that variable for your company.”

In other words, don’t buy into hype, buy into science. There are many robust and repeatable measures that can be used for your particular challenge(s).

So, join me in making 2018 the year you both stop creating and purveying this statistical nonsense, and stop responding to these junk surveys. I know it’s hard. There are a lot of neuroscientifically-based reasons why it’s so enticing to tap on a score on your smartphone’s screen which then goes into the ether, even when you know it’s going to be used for nothing at all. And Albert Michelson and Edward Morley disproved the ether (luminiferous aether) about 130 years ago. Perhaps I’ll cover some of the reasons we’re so attached to particular analytics and m-surveys next month. Or maybe not.

Reference
• Keiningham, T. L., Cooil, B., Andreassen, T.W., & Aksoy, L. (2007). A longitudinal examination of net promoter and firm revenue growth. Journal of Marketing, 71 (July), 39-51.
• Chrzan, K. (2007). Testing alternatives to importance ratings. Maritz. http://www.maritz.com/~/media/Files/MaritzDotCom/White%20Papers/Research/Testing-Alternatives-to-Importance-Ratings.ashx
• Ensing, D. (2017). NPS: Using it correctly. MaritzCX. https://www.maritzcx.com/blog/nps-using-correctly/

Ben Locwin Is a contributing editor to Contract Pharma, where he’s headed the Clinically Speaking column for 4 years. He’s a bestselling author, an international speaker and an operational strategist for pharma and healthcare. He’s an adviser within the American Statistical Association, an advisory board member for ATD, and serves on various Boards of Directors.