I’m a vocal supporter of Southwest Airlines. I love their values. I love their differentiated strategy. When a friend asks for a recommendation on which airline to fly, Southwest is the first name out of my mouth.
And yet, I’ve only flown with them once in my life.
On the other hand, there’s United. Over the last decade as a frequent business traveler, I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars a year with them. I’m a high-value, consistent, and “sticky” customer due to the airports they fly in and out of. But I don’t love United. I rarely recommend them, even though I fly with them all the time. If you asked me for my sentiment toward the brand, I’d probably give them a shrug or a sigh.
This disconnect, the chasm between what we say and what we actually do, is the fundamental flaw in the most overused metric in modern business: the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
The Illusion of Safety
For years, as I scaled my last venture, we lived and died by NPS. It was our North Star for client satisfaction. But even as we grew, I felt a nagging sense of unease.
I saw the same story play out several times a year: a client would give us a glowing NPS score, praising our team and our culture, and then—sometimes just two weeks later—send us a termination notice. I even had one client make a warm introduction to a new prospect within a week of deciding to churn.
Our clients liked us. They recommended us. Our NPS scores were consistently through the roof. All of that was great. That didn’t mean our clients always stayed around, though. That was a problem.
At the time, we knew NPS was an imperfect tool for predicting retention and growth. But we used it anyway. Why? Because there was no alternative. We were trying to navigate complex, multi-million dollar relationships using a cracked compass when what we really needed was a rock-solid, reliable GPS.
Sentiment is Not Sustainability
The hard truth is that NPS is a brand loyalty metric, not a commercial health metric or a way to predict future wallet share. It measures how someone feels about you in a vacuum and at a single point-in-time, often influenced by their most recent positive interaction with you. It doesn’t measure operational friction, budget shifts, competitive pressure, or the actual value being realized.
We recently saw a striking example of this in our data at Knownwell. We analyzed a set of high-growth accounts with NPS scores that were nearly perfect: 9s and 10s across the board. By any traditional standard, these were healthy clients.
However, when we applied a deeper layer of relationship intelligence—looking at real-time communication patterns, delivery velocity, and stakeholder engagement—the platform flagged 20 of those Promoter clients as high-risk.
As we dug in further, we realized that this company was plagued by surprise churn. Over the past several years, they were continually dealing with rising churn. There was a systematic problem, but their measure didn’t surface it.
The NPS wasn’t “wrong” per se, it was just measuring the wrong things. Those clients might have liked the brand, and they may well have recommended them to others (which is the question at the heart of NPS), but the underlying commercial relationships were fraying.
Why the “Promoter” Can Still Be a Churn Risk
Why does a 10/10 NPS score fail to predict a breakup? There are three main reasons in my experience:
- The Nice Guy Bias: People are generally polite. In a B2B relationship, your primary point of contact might love your team personally, but their boss’s boss is looking at a spreadsheet and seeing no ROI. NPS captures the individual’s affection, not the organization’s commitment.
- Lagging vs. Leading: NPS is a snapshot of the past. It’s a reflection of how the relationship has been. Commercial health is about the future—the propensity for that relationship to sustain and grow.
- The Southwest Problem: As I mentioned earlier, loyalty doesn’t always equal spend. You can be a “Promoter” of a brand you don’t actually use or a “Detractor” of a service you can’t live without. Who likes their phone provider, after all? Yet, how regularly do you switch? I’ve hated my relationship with Verizon for decades, yet that auto-draft from my credit card keeps feeding their bottom line every month, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
From Sentiment to Intelligence
At Knownwell, we talk and think a lot about Commercial Health. This isn’t just a rebranded NPS. It’s an acknowledgment that in the professional services and SaaS worlds, the health of a relationship is found in the in-between spaces: the frequency of communication, the sentiment of emails (not surveys), the stability of the project team, and the alignment of outcomes.
We aren’t saying NPS is useless. It’s actually helpful data, but it’s different data. It’s a measure of brand affinity. If you want to know if your revenue is safe, if a client is going to renew, or if there is a real opportunity to expand a client relationship, you have to look far deeper than a single question asked once a quarter.
It’s time we stop relying on recommendations to a friend or colleague to predict the future of our companies. It’s time we start using intelligence to understand the commercial reality and complexity of our partnerships. Because at the end of the day, I’d much rather have a “Detractor” who spends $60k a year with me than a “Promoter” who never gets off the ground.
