Drop NPS, Use This Instead

Let’s be honest: NPS is overrated.

It’s that one metric everyone seems to report but nobody seems to really act on. It gives you a number and a trend, sure. But that number is vague, delayed, and often detached from actual product decisions.

As product managers, we need signals, not just sentiment. And that’s where CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) and CES (Customer Effort Score) shine.

What NPS gets wrong

Net Promoter Score is built around one question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” Sounds good in theory, until you realize that:

• It’s heavily biased by mood, timing, and recent experience, without any idea what that recent experience was in your product: a new integration configuration, a core workflow, or a casual check on how things are going.
• It’s impossible to tie to a specific product change.
• It tells you how people feel, but not why or what to fix.

And when that quarterly NPS report comes in with a score of 42… now what?

You could try following up with detractors to figure out why it’s not 100, but in my experience that rarely gains much traction. And why would it? You just made someone click through a quick pop-up about how they feel, and now you’re asking for a 45-minute call to explain their mood?

CSAT: measure the full picture

Customer Satisfaction surveys are detailed.

“How satisfied were you with this feature?”
“How was your support experience?”

That makes them actionable. And because they’re detailed, they’re great input for roadmap planning and strategic adjustment. Want to know if your onboarding redesign actually helped? Ask CSAT. Want to know whether your efforts to improve current functionality should go to Module A or Module B? Check their current satisfaction scores.

CES: lack of friction is a feature

If CSAT tells you how people feel, Customer Effort Score tells you how hard you made them work:

“How easy was it to complete this task?”

This one’s a secret weapon that virtually nobody seems to use; it’s probably the least famous of the three.

Why is it so valuable? Because effort predicts loyalty better than delight does. Nobody quits your product because it wasn’t magical. They quit because it was confusing, clunky, or tiring. CES helps you find and fix that.

It’s particularly powerful for:

• Critical multi-step flows (checkout, uploads, setup, new key objects)
• New user onboarding
• Support deflection

Last but not least, it connects nicely with your Jobs-to-be-Done research. It can directly answer how hard it is to complete a critical sub-job in your product!

The takeaway

NPS is a brand metric. If you’re running a product, you need flow-level and touchpoint-level insights. That’s what CSAT and CES offer.

Next time someone asks for your NPS score, you can smile and say: “We’re optimizing for effort and satisfaction instead. It actually helps us build better products.”