is-googlebot-how-googles-web-crawler-works">of-satisfaction-rating-800x450.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Concept of satisfaction rating" style="margin-bottom: 15px" />Metrics are a polarizing topic in customer experience. There are ongoing discussions about which CX metric is the best. Net Promoter Score (NPS) remains one of the most widely adopted metrics. However, it faces growing criticism, prompting many organizations to favor alternatives like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or Customer Effort Score (CES). Each year, a new metric emerges, championed by analysts or consultants claiming it solves the limitations of its predecessors.
But this debate overlooks a critical issue: how these metrics are utilized. One of organizations’ most common mistakes is setting performance goals and targets tied to CX metrics. Regardless of the metric chosen, measuring performance based on survey-driven metrics undermines their value. This leads to unintended negative consequences for frontline employees, customers and the organization as a whole.
Implications for frontline employees
Organizations often use CX metrics like NPS or CSAT to evaluate frontline employees’ performance. However, many factors beyond the employee’s control influence a customer’s perception of their experience.
For instance, a customer may contact support to express dissatisfaction with a company policy that the agent cannot change. It’s demoralizing when employees do everything they can to resolve an issue and still receive poor survey scores. Over time, this erodes trust in the metrics and increases employee turnover.
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Implications for customers
The negative impact on employees often trickles down to customers in several ways. Demotivated employees are less likely to provide high-quality service. Employees may engage in behaviors that harm customers to navigate what they perceive as an unfair system. They might avoid complex cases or transfer calls to other departments to avoid receiving a bad score.
Linking performance to CX metrics can annoy customers even when the service meets their needs. The most common example is when companies urge customers to complete a survey, emphasizing that a high score is critical to an employee’s job. Feedback should be voluntary, not a burden. When customers feel pressured to provide feedback, it often results in reluctant or artificial responses.
Subtler effects can also emerge. A few years ago, my wife and I began hosting on Airbnb. We were fully committed to delivering great experiences for our guests. Our efforts earned us Superhost status, boosting the visibility of our listings. However, despite mostly five-star reviews, a few four-star reviews — due to factors beyond our control — dropped our rating in December to just above the Superhost cutoff.
With the next review scheduled for Jan. 1, maintaining Superhost status felt more valuable than risking another four-star review. I chose not to accept new reservations during December to avoid losing our status. I also removed a popular listing from a key tourist area during the peak travel season. This protected our status but negatively impacted Airbnb and potential guests.
While reviews as a performance measure make sense in theory, this demonstrates the impact of performance tied to factors outside an individual’s control.
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Implications for the organization
Organizations lose valuable, constructive feedback when CX metric targets influence employee or customer behavior. Inflated scores — caused by employees asking for high ratings or systems penalizing anything less than five stars — can create a false sense of success. Feedback that could drive improvements is never received, and disenchanted customers leave.
But what about setting performance targets against CX metrics at the organizational level instead of the individual level? Even that can be problematic because customer sentiment is complex and influenced by many factors.
Improving company-wide NPS requires a holistic approach. However, I have seen too many organizations treat CX targets like revenue targets and divide up a goal across different teams, as in the waterfall chart below.
This approach never works, as survey-based metrics lack the precision needed for such an approach. Teams often spend more time debating targets than improving experiences. In extreme cases, pressure to hit targets can lead to manipulation of survey results, defeating the goal of enhancing customer experience.
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The better approach: CX metrics as a North Star
You might question the purpose of CX metrics, given the difficulty of setting goals against them. How are we supposed to measure the performance of CX efforts?
Look at your survey-based CX metrics as a North Star — a guiding tool to align efforts on improving the customer experience. Feedback should be analyzed to identify specific actions to enhance CX, and performance goals should focus on completing those 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 the pitfalls described in this article.
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