Continuing my streak of blasphemous remarks about customer experience, I believe that customer satisfaction scores (and their sibling NPS) are rarely the right metrics for evaluating CX initiatives. There are two simple reasons why.

First, our satisfaction / likelihood to recommend emerges from an unfathomable array of factors: price, product, service, brand, advertising, competitive action, etc.

Unless you have control over these factors, you're volunteering to be measured on something that's beyond your influence. The only person who can be evaluated on these metrics is the CEO.

A CX program that tried to manipulate all the inputs would be so massive and unwieldy it would deliver nothing.

Second, revenue, CSAT and NPS often move independently, and we can't easily tell which of the factors affecting them has the most impact at any give time. As such relying on them to prove returns is fraught with risk.

Instead I favor project-specific metrics that relate directly to the business goal I’m trying to achieve, and where the impact of interventions is much clearer — task completion rates, traffic volumes, conversion, product returns, complaints, etc.

This approach leads to smaller, more effective projects that deliver real returns in less time. Who doesn’t want that?

See this post on LinkedIn