Metrics are a polarizing topic in customer experience. There are ongoing discussions about which CX metric is best. Net Promoter Score (NPS) remains one of the most widely adopted metrics. However, it is the subject of increasing criticism, prompting many organizations to favor alternatives such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) or customer effort score (CES). Every year, a new measure emerges, championed by analysts or consultants claiming that it addresses the limitations of its predecessors.
However, this debate overlooks a crucial issue: how these measures are used. One of the most common mistakes organizations make is setting performance goals and targets tied to CX metrics. Regardless of which metric you choose, measuring performance based on survey-based metrics undermines their value. This leads to unintended negative consequences for front-line employees, customers, and the organization as a whole.
Implications for frontline employees
Organizations often use CX metrics such as NPS or CSAT to evaluate the performance of frontline employees. However, many factors beyond the employee’s control influence the customer’s perception of their experience.
For example, a customer may contact support to express dissatisfaction with a company policy that the agent cannot change. It’s demoralizing to see employees do everything they can to resolve a problem and still receive poor results on a survey. Over time, this erodes confidence in the metrics and increases staff turnover.
Dig Deeper: How employee experience drives customer satisfaction
Implications for customers
The negative impact on employees often trickles down to customers in several ways. Disengaged employees are less likely to provide high-quality service. Employees may engage in behaviors that harm customers to navigate what they perceive to be an unfair system. They may avoid complex cases or transfer calls to other departments to avoid receiving a poor score.
Tying performance to CX metrics can annoy customers even when the service meets their needs. The most common example is when companies invite customers to complete a survey, emphasizing that a high score is essential to an employee’s work. Comments should be voluntary and not a burden. When customers feel obligated to provide feedback, it often results in reluctant or contrived 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 exceptional experiences for our customers. Our efforts earned us Superhost status, increasing 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 in December to just above the Superhost threshold.
With the next review scheduled for January 1, maintaining Superhost status seemed more valuable than risking another 4-star review. I have chosen not to accept new reservations during December to avoid losing our status. I also removed a popular ad in a key tourist area during peak tourist season. This protected our status but negatively impacted Airbnb and potential guests.
Although ratings as a performance measure make sense in theory, they show the impact of performance related to factors beyond an individual’s control.
Dig Deeper: How Customer Satisfaction Fuels B2B Profitability
Implications for the organization
Organizations lose valuable and constructive feedback when CX metric goals influence employee or customer behavior. Inflated scores – caused by employees demanding high ratings or systems penalizing fewer than five stars – can create a false sense of achievement. Feedback that could lead to improvements is never received and disenchanted customers leave.
But what about setting performance goals against CX metrics at the organizational level rather than the individual level? Even this can be problematic, because customer sentiment is complex and influenced by many factors.
Improving company-wide NPS requires a holistic approach. However, I’ve seen too many organizations treat CX goals like revenue goals and distribute a goal among different teams, like in the waterfall chart below.
This approach never works, because survey-based measures lack the precision needed for such an approach. Teams often spend more time debating goals than improving experiences. In extreme cases, the 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
The Best Approach: CX Metrics as the North Star
You might question the purpose of CX Metrics, given the difficulty of setting goals. How are we supposed to measure the performance of CX efforts?
Think of your survey-based CX metrics as a North Star: a guiding tool for aligning efforts toward improving the customer experience. Feedback should be analyzed to identify specific actions to improve the customer experience, and performance goals should focus on achieving these actions.
This simple shift from measuring performance against the tangible actions that drive a metric to measuring against it will improve CX while avoiding all of the pitfalls described in this article.
Dig Deeper: 24 Customer Experience Misconceptions Debunked
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the supervision of the writing and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
