Net Promoter Score-like metric for internal "monopolistic" product

Question

I'm working on product that is integrated as part of the bigger package of products. One kind of stakeholder are other product teams that request features and use features from us. Other kind of stakeholder are our customers who use the product in relation to other products.

I would like to gather a Net-promoter-score like metric of how they feel about our product. But I'm having a problem with the question of "How likely you are to recommend our product to a friend". The two issues I have are:

• The stakeholders don't have a choice in the matter. They need to use our product, because that is the only option available.
• There aren't really other "friends" who could be potentially using it.
• Our customers only see our product as small part of a whole package. So asking about just our product might confuse them.

Is there any alternative metrics or possibly different question I could ask our stakeholders to get their overall feelings about quality of our product and service we provide to them in improving the product for them?

Some clarifications after answers:

I'm asking for NPS-like so that it can be aggregated into single value and tracked over time. This will be only high-level overview metric. I will ask more specific questions to know what areas are most problematic. I do have some unstructured word-of-mouth feedback that satisfaction with our product and services we provide in relation to it are not the best. But I would like feedback that is more structured and "scientific".

Answer 1

The stakeholders may not have a choice, but they will still have an opinion.

I'd phrase the question in terms of how satisfied they are.

• "On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with the product?"
• "On a scale of 1 to 5, how accurately do you feel the product meets requirements?"

More useful than a rating answer is direct feedback:

• "Name an example of how you feel the product meets requirements"
• "Name an example of how you feel the product does not meet requirements"

Answer 2

I am a big fan of NPS. However, it has a specific purpose and it sounds like your need does not fit that purpose. I would look back at exactly what it is you want to know. Some questions you should consider in identifying the right things to ask:

1) Do you want to know about the overall opinion about the product or a specific impact it has (satisfied vs it effectively does X)?

2) Is it about the whole product or a particular feature?

3) Do you want people to think about their last interaction or many? If it was their last interaction, do you have any way to track the details about that interaction?

4) What are some ways you plan to use the data you collect? I'd encourage you to create some hypotheticals like "If I hear X back, I would take this action, but if Y is more common, I'd take this other action." If you can't do this, your metrics may be too vague.

6) Have you already made up your mind? There's an old research joke that you can consider a project a success if you have to throw away no more than half of your data to prove your point. Sadly, a lot of measurement activities are frivolous because people will just look at the data that tells them what they want to hear.

7) Finally, is a survey the right way to answer your question. A lot of internal products are made to make processes faster. A survey can tell you if people think that the process is faster, but you could probably build other reporting tools that tell you if they really are faster.