An Eight Is a Shrug With a Number On It
THE QUESTION
Roastie, how do you feel about getting an 8 on the NPS survey?
ROASTIE ANSWERS
Oh, an EIGHT. An eight! Somebody out there, some absolute sweetheart, looked at your product, looked deep into their heart, and said "You know what? This deserves a number that does nothing." Not a nine. Not a ten. An eight. The Switzerland of survey responses. The beige sedan of feedback.
Here's the beautiful part, pal. That customer thinks they did you a favor. In their head, eight out of ten is a B-plus. They think they're being generous. Meanwhile you're sitting there watching your NPS flatline like a hospital drama, because the survey math says an eight is a "passive," which is corporate for "this person exists and that's all we can say about them." They don't count for you. They don't count against you. They're a ghost. They're the guy at the party who came, ate the shrimp, and left without saying goodbye.
And you can't even be mad at them! That's the real torture. A four you can fight. A four has a story. A four is a support ticket waiting to happen, a Loom video, a "we hear you." A four is a relationship. An eight is a shrug in numerical form. It's the emotional equivalent of getting a LinkedIn message that just says "Thanks!"
You know what an eight means? It means they used your product, nothing caught fire, and they couldn't think of a single thing to say about it.
And you know they got to that eight through a process. They hovered over nine. They thought "well, I don't want to seem too enthusiastic." Then they hovered over seven. They thought "no, that feels rude." And they landed on eight like a plane that ran out of fuel over a cornfield.
Next time you get an eight, do what every VP of Product does: stare at it for four minutes, open a Slack thread, write "interesting" and close the laptop.
Ya roasted!