“Love” is the wrong metric

Original
Customer love, delight, superfan, promoter.
No matter what youre building, its tempting to aspire for your customers to love your product. We want them to be delighted, to endorse or recommend, to become a superfan or a promoter. And its not always realistic.
Overusing love as a metric feels disrespectful to me. Its ignoring the reality of how customers make decisions and how they talk with each other about the things they do and use.
Words matter. When we ask the wrong question, we get misleading answers. Worse yet, we signal that we dont get it that we are accidentally or willfully pursuing our goals over that of our customers.

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