War-game an NPS program before survey invites, dashboard claims, and executive talk tracks harden into how every loyalty number gets quoted.
NPS programs fail when the sample invents promoters the product never earned, when detractor follow-up never owns a ticket, when scores dual-count the same account across products, and when board slides treat a pulse as a causal proof. A neat dashboard tile is not evidence.
Freeze the package
State the proposed survey cadence, which cohorts get invited, who owns detractor follow-up and closed-loop fixes, what success looks like after two quarters of response quality, and the kill criteria if sample bias or action lag past a named threshold. Attach the invite logic, cohort definitions, closed-loop workflow, and the measured lag from detractor alert to owner response. If product, success, and finance disagree on whether NPS buys retention or just a slide, reconcile before seating.
Name the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new, and the hold criteria if any cohort still lacks a named follow-up owner or a measured response path.
Seats
- Detractor customer. Fear that the survey asks for a score while nobody will fix the ticket behind it.
- CS lead. Closed-loop math that looks clean while capacity cannot clear the queue.
- Product. Score targets that invent roadmap pressure without named owners.
- Finance. Dual-counted loyalty claims that invent retention the ledger will not show.
- Skeptic. The claim that looks strongest and is least sourced.
Optional research seat if survey design or sample rules bind the form. Same pack for every seat.
Run the loop
Feed Pingpong the NPS memo and exhibits. First pass steelmans the program. Later passes attack from the seats above. Final pass turns surviving objections into clearer cohort rules, a published closed-loop SLA, or a hold. Delete invented "customers already love us" claims and dual-counted scores.
Force a day-after narrative: what happens if a journalist quotes your NPS against a public outage, if detractor tickets never log, or if finance cannot reconcile loyalty claims to churn. If those stories are stronger than your mitigation plan, fix the package before you launch. Separate an NPS program from a customer health score or a win-loss program so each decision stays testable.
Ask every seat to mark which steps are optional in practice. Optional closed-loop reviews become skipped within a month if nobody names the owner and the time box. Related: war-game a customer health score, war-game a win-loss program, war-game a churn response, pretend you are the customer success lead, and the war-game decisions hub. Process: how to run a Pingpong.