Improving the World’s Leading AI Data Contributor Platform

Since launching in 2023, Outlier has grown quickly and now provides tens of thousands of contributors the opportunity to earn supplemental income as they help to shape the future of groundbreaking AI technology.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the results of Outlier’s Q3 Net Promoter Score (NPS), a common measure of user loyalty and satisfaction, which provides a score between -100 and 100. We saw a significant increase of 14 points this quarter, bringing our score to 44. To put this into perspective, the average NPS score in SurveyMonkey’s dataset of 150,000 companies is 32, placing our score of 44 well above this benchmark.

This progress demonstrates the improvements we’ve made to Outlier, which we have continued to roll out in Q4. These improvements are driven by feedback from the experts who work on our platform. These include:

1. Fast, reliable issue support: We offer quick resolution to issues raised through our support channels. We’ve created a dedicated pay escalation team, and over the past 12 weeks on Outlier, 96% of pay-related tickets were resolved within 10 days. We are also in the process of doubling the size of our support team, which is available 24/7, and contributors can submit tickets or use an anonymous hotline to report issues. Additionally, we are rolling out a way to directly chat with support later this month. 

2. Increased pay transparency and reliability: We’ve introduced a more granular and real-time view of earnings to ensure contributors can easily track their payouts and link them back to the work they performed.

3. Streamlined project onboarding:  We have reduced the average onboarding time to a first project from multiple weeks to just a few days. 

4. Simplified and user-friendly tasking experience: The chat companion autofeedback tool, an automated assistant, helps contributors submit high quality data in real time.

5. Increased project availability and choice:  We are piloting a marketplace feature that makes it easier for contributors to find backup projects and have choices between which projects they work on. 

Outlier’s platform enables diverse specialists — like mathematicians, linguists, coders, and more — to apply and monetize their expertise. In the past year alone, tens of thousands of contributors from around the world have earned hundreds of millions of dollars on Outlier. 

As we celebrate this progress, we want to be clear that our work is far from over. Our goal is to build a platform that evolves with the needs of our contributors. We remain committed to listening, acting on feedback, and making real changes to improve the experience of contributors on Outlier.  

Methodology: The survey was conducted through the platform Sprig to evaluate contributor satisfaction. NPS surveys take a straightforward approach to measuring sentiment, asking, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” Respondents who select a 9 or 10 are considered promoters — enthusiastic supporters of the platform, and anyone who provides a 6 or below are classified as detractors.

NPS scores are calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The survey had a robust sample size, with thousands of responses. It was randomly distributed each month to contributors who logged into the platform, providing the most accurate readout on the sentiment of our contributor pool at that moment in time.