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Are your CX metrics hurting your customer experience?


Metrics are a polarizing topic customer experience. There are ongoing debates about which CX metric is best. Net Promoter Score (NPS) remains one of the most widely used metrics. However, it faces increasing criticism, forcing many organizations to favor alternatives such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or Customer Effort Score (CES). Every year a new metric emerges, promoted by analysts or consultants that claim to address the limitations of its predecessors.

However, this debate overlooks a critical issue: how these metrics are used. One of the most common mistakes organizations make is setting performance goals and objectives tied to CX metrics. Regardless of the metric chosen, measuring performance based on survey-based metrics undermines their value. This leads to unintended negative consequences for frontline employees, customers and the organization as a whole.

Implications for frontline staff

Organizations often use CX metrics such as NPS or CSAT to evaluate the performance of frontline employees. However, the customer’s perception of their experience is affected by many factors beyond the employee’s control.

For example, a customer may contact support to express dissatisfaction with a company policy that cannot be changed by a representative. It’s demoralizing when employees do everything they can to fix a problem and still get poor survey results. Over time, this erodes trust in metrics and increases employee turnover.

Dig deeper: How employee experience drives customer satisfaction

Implications for customers

Negative impact on employees is often transmitted to customers in several ways. Demotivated employees are less likely to provide high quality service. Employees may engage in behavior that harms customers in order to navigate what they perceive to be an unfair system. They may avoid complex cases or transfer calls to other departments to avoid a bad score.

Linking performance to CX metrics can annoy customers, even if the service meets their needs. The most common example is when companies invite customers to fill out a survey and emphasize that a high score is essential to an employee’s job. Feedback should be voluntary, not a burden. When customers feel pressured to provide feedback, it often leads to reluctant or artificial responses.

More subtle effects may also appear. A few years ago, my wife and I started hosting on Airbnb. We were fully committed to providing our guests with a great experience. Our efforts earned us Superhost status, which increased the visibility of our listings. However, despite mostly 5-star reviews, a few 4-star reviews – due to factors beyond our control – dropped our rating to just above the Superhost mark in December.

With the next review scheduled for January 1st, maintaining Superhost status was more valuable than risking another 4-star review. I decided not to accept new bookings during December so as not to lose our status. I also removed a popular entry from a key tourist area during peak tourist season. This protected our status but negatively impacted Airbnb and potential guests.

While reviews as a measure of performance make sense in theory, it shows the impact of performance tied to factors outside of an individual’s control.

Dig deeper: How customer satisfaction drives B2B profitability

Implications for the organization

Organizations lose valuable, constructive feedback when CX metrics influence employee or customer behavior. Inflated scores – caused by staff demanding high ratings or systems penalizing anything less than five stars – can create a false sense of achievement. Feedback that could lead to improvement is never received and disillusioned customers leave.

But what about setting performance goals against CX metrics at the organizational level instead of the individual level? Even this can be problematic because customer sentiment is complex and influenced by many factors.

Improving enterprise-wide NPS requires a holistic approach. However, I’ve seen too many organizations treat CX goals like revenue goals and split the goal between different teams, as shown in the waterfall chart below.

This approach never works because survey-based metrics lack the precision needed for such an approach. Teams often spend more time discussing goals than improving the experience. In extreme cases, pressure to meet targets can lead to manipulation of survey results, defeating the goal of improving the customer experience.

Dig deeper: 5 Simple Ways to Improve Customer Experience

A better approach: CX metrics like Polárka

You may question the purpose of CX Metrics, given the difficulty of setting goals against them. How should we measure the performance of CX efforts?

View your survey-based CX metrics as a Polaris—a major tool for aligning your customer experience improvement efforts. Feedback should be analyzed to identify specific actions to improve CX, and performance targets should focus on completing those actions.

This simple shift from measuring performance against the tangible actions that drive the metric to measuring against it will improve CX while avoiding all the pitfalls described in this article.

Dig deeper: 24 customer experience misconceptions uncovered

Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are selected for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under supervision editorial office and submissions are reviewed for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.



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