Beyond NPS
GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia
In the world of customer experience (CX), the Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become the gold standard. With its simple, elegant question — “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” — it has given leaders a seemingly clear and powerful metric to track customer loyalty. And while NPS has served its purpose, it has, in my opinion, become a crutch. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I am here to argue that chasing a single score is a dangerous oversimplification. It tells you what is happening, but it provides almost no insight into why or how to fix it. The future of customer experience innovation belongs to organizations that move beyond a single number and embrace a holistic, multi-dimensional metric framework that captures the full, rich tapestry of the customer journey.
The problem with a metric like NPS is that it is a lagging indicator. It measures the outcome of an experience, but it doesn’t diagnose the cause. It’s like a doctor taking your temperature and knowing you have a fever, but having no idea if the cause is a minor cold or a serious infection. This singular focus can lead to a host of negative consequences: a lack of actionable insight, a disconnection from real customer behavior, and a dangerous internal obsession with “gaming the number” at the expense of genuine customer value. To truly innovate the customer experience, we must stop chasing a score and start understanding the human story behind it. We need to measure not just what customers say, but what they do and how they feel.
Building a Holistic CX Metric Framework: The Three Dimensions
A more effective approach to measuring customer experience involves a framework that looks at three distinct, yet interconnected, dimensions. These are your essential innovation levers:
- 1. Behavioral Metrics (The “What”): These are the objective data points that show what your customers are actually doing. Metrics like repeat purchase rate, average session time, feature adoption, time to resolution for a support ticket, or product usage frequency provide hard, undeniable facts about customer engagement. These tell you if your product or service is truly creating value.
- 2. Perceptual Metrics (The “How They Think”): This is where traditional scores can be useful, but in a more nuanced way. Metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES) — “How much effort did you have to put in to get your issue resolved?” — or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) on a specific interaction are incredibly powerful. They tell you if the experience was easy, simple, and satisfying.
- 3. Emotional Metrics (The “How They Feel”): This is the most critical and often overlooked dimension. It goes beyond a simple number to capture the emotional state of the customer. Use sentiment analysis on open-ended survey responses, call center transcripts, or social media comments. Qualitative feedback, such as an interview where a customer shares a story of a “wow” moment or a frustrating interaction, provides the color and context that no score ever could.
In the pursuit of holistic experience management, many of my clients are turning to strategic partners to help them build the necessary infrastructure. A great example of this is the work being done by companies like HCLTech, which helps clients implement Experience Management Offices (XMOs). These are not just new departments; they are a centralized command center for an organization’s entire experience ecosystem. By creating a dedicated XMO, companies can move beyond siloed efforts and begin to measure and manage experiences for their customers, partners, and employees as a unified whole. This includes the deployment of Experience Level Measures (XLMs), a set of sophisticated metrics that go far beyond a simple NPS score. XLMs capture the full journey, measuring everything from emotional sentiment and perceived effort to behavioral data and digital engagement. It’s a fundamental shift from a reactive, score-based approach to a proactive, human-centered one, ensuring that every touchpoint is optimized for a truly superior experience.
“The best metric is not a score; it’s a story. And a holistic framework gives you the chapters, the characters, and the plot points you need to innovate.”
Case Study 1: Zappos and the Obsession with “Wow”
The Challenge:
In the early 2000s, Zappos faced the monumental challenge of building a viable e-commerce business for shoes, a category that many believed would never succeed online due to the need for a physical try-on. The challenge was not just to sell shoes but to create a customer experience so exceptional that it would overcome the inherent friction of online retail and build a brand on trust and loyalty.
The Holistic Metrics Response:
Zappos’ innovation was not just in their business model, but in their metric framework. While they tracked revenue, they were obsessed with delivering “wow” moments. They didn’t just measure Customer Satisfaction; they actively encouraged employees to spend a minimum of an hour on a single customer service call to build a deep, human connection. They measured the number of free shipping upgrades to delight customers. The company was willing to spend money on a customer call or shipping because they understood the immense, long-term value of an emotional connection. Their core metric wasn’t NPS; it was the number of times they could surprise and delight a customer. Their behavioral metric was the high rate of repeat purchases, which they knew was a direct result of the positive emotions they fostered.
The Result:
Zappos became famous for its customer service. The emotional and behavioral metrics they prioritized directly led to high customer lifetime value and an army of loyal brand advocates. This focus on the holistic experience was their primary innovation, and it created a level of brand love that was almost impossible for competitors to replicate. The lesson: by measuring the moments that matter, you can build a more resilient and beloved business.
Case Study 2: HubSpot’s Proactive Customer Health Score
The Challenge:
In the world of B2B SaaS, customer churn is a constant threat. Historically, companies would rely on a lagging indicator — cancellation — to know when a customer was at risk. The challenge for HubSpot, a leader in marketing and sales software, was to move from a reactive posture to a proactive one. They wanted to know a customer was unhappy or disengaged long before they decided to leave.
The Holistic Metrics Response:
HubSpot developed a “Customer Health Score” as their primary innovation metric. This wasn’t a simple survey result; it was a holistic metric composed of three key dimensions:
- Behavioral: How often were they logging in? Were they adopting and using the key features of the software? Was their team size expanding or contracting?
- Perceptual: What was their satisfaction with the support team?
- Emotional: What was the sentiment from a recent check-in call with their account manager?
By combining these dimensions, HubSpot could see a comprehensive view of a customer’s health. For example, a customer who was logging in less frequently and had a recent low satisfaction score would be flagged as at-risk, even if they hadn’t expressed a desire to leave. This gave the team a chance to intervene and innovate the experience — by offering more training, providing personalized support, or addressing a specific pain point — before it was too late.
The Result:
HubSpot’s proactive, holistic approach to customer health significantly reduced churn and increased customer lifetime value. By moving beyond a single metric like NPS and instead focusing on the full story of customer behavior, perception, and emotion, they were able to build a more resilient customer base and a product that continuously evolved to meet customer needs. This case study proves that a holistic metric framework is not just a tool for measurement but a powerful engine for continuous innovation.
Conclusion: The Future of Experience is Human
A single score, no matter how elegant, is an oversimplification of the complex human experience. It is a tool for the passive manager, not the human-centered innovator. The most successful organizations of the future will be those that have the courage to move beyond the comfort of a single number and embrace the messy, beautiful complexity of their customers’ lives. By building a holistic metric framework that measures what people do, how they think, and how they feel, we can move from simply managing customer satisfaction to truly innovating the human experience.
The time has come to stop chasing a number and start listening to the human story. The next great innovation is not hiding in a spreadsheet; it’s waiting for you to find it in the heart of your customer’s journey.
Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.
Image credit: Unsplash
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