What do you do when your NPS is at 12 but revenue retention is over 110%?

Our Net Promoter Score was consistently sitting at a depressing 12, yet our revenue retention was over 110%. We were completely confused.

When we jumped on 1-on-1 calls with customers, we discovered that users found our product's interface ugly and clunky, but the core data it generated was so indispensable to their daily operations that they couldn't switch to a competitor even if they wanted to. They were paying us every month while actively disliking the daily experience.

If you've ever inherited a product with high utility but terrible UX: do you pause all new feature development to rebuild the interface, or keep shipping value and live with a frustrated user base?