Forging a Stronger Academic-Practitioner Partnership–The Case of Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This research examines the issues that impede the development of robust academic analysis of popular managerial practices and metrics using the case of the Net Promoter Score/System (NPS). The issues identified include limited academic access to the original methodology/data underlying a managerial practice, different vocabularies used by academics and practitioners, the inability of academics to disprove unfalsifiable claims, and the lack of any precise specification of theory. Finally, academics’ failure to pay detailed attention to dependent variables leads to confused messages being sent to managers. We offer recommendations to overcome these issues.