Idea: Government NPS (Net Promoter Score)

Would you recommend this government to a friend?

Here’s a random idea. NPS (Net Promoter Score) is used by many different companies to evaluate the customer experience. The essential question to calculate a Net Promoter Score is:

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend our organization to a friend or colleague?

The 0–6s are considered detractors, the 7s and 8s are passives and the 9s and 10s are the promoters. The NPS is calculated as:

(Number of Promoters — Number of Detractors) / (Number of Respondents) x 100

Here is an idea: I think the government at every level (city, state, federal) should implement an NPS that is publicly available on its site and through an API. I would also do this for any particular agency or sub-organization in the government.

I think if they optimized for this number improving the government would be so much better than it is today. It forces an organization that cares about this metric to be customer-focused, and it seems very sensible to me for a government to be responsive to its citizens.

I’m not sure what the NPS would be of your state government or the federal government, or congress, but I’m guessing very negative and probably around -80. There are various opinion/polling surveys but I’m not sure if they are asked in the NPS-style format.

Anyways, that is a simple random policy idea that I think would make the government a lot better.