We don't track NPS anymore. Here's what we use instead.

NPS told us a number between negative 100 and 100 that we could compare to benchmarks but couldn't act on. A score of 45 this month versus 42 last month. What does that mean? What specifically should we do differently? The score changed but the signal for action was absent.

What we replaced it with is a single open-ended question sent quarterly to active customers: "What's the one thing about the product that frustrates you most right now?" No rating scale. No multiple choice. Just that one question with a text field.

The responses are specific and actionable in a way NPS never was. "The search results aren't relevant" is something I can fix. "43 NPS" is something I can present in a board slide but not something that tells me what to build next.

Response rates are lower than NPS because the question requires more effort. But every response contains usable information whereas most NPS responses contained a number without context. We get maybe sixty responses per quarter and they consistently surface the two or three things most worth improving. Patterns emerge naturally when the same frustration appears across multiple responses.

The tradeoff is losing benchmarkability. I can't compare our "top frustration" metric against industry averages the way I could with NPS. I'm comfortable with that tradeoff because I'd rather have data that drives product improvement than data that drives investor presentations.