NPS Burnout Pt. 3 — What leadership really hears

We had deliberately set aside the old question, “How satisfied are our customers?” It had come back to bite us in that steering committee, when the CMO silenced the room with a single sentence: “I’ve got enough numbers.” She wanted to know what the company should do differently tomorrow, and we couldn’t really give her an answer.

The question we asked ourselves afterwards was: Which experiences along the customer journey create value, and which ones cost it? That sounds like a nuance. But it is a different direction of thinking. Away from mere “monitoring” toward “impact.”

Customer journeys can sometimes be incredibly complex. This is especially true in a B2B context. Dozens of touchpoints, multiple decision-makers, fragmented data structures, digital and analog channels alternating. The traditional view of customer satisfaction comes from a time without multichannel experiences, without “digital,” and with relatively clear assumptions about cause and effect. In that world, a single NPS score would still be a useful navigational aid. But pure market research metrics are no longer enough to navigate today’s complexity.

What actually reaches executives are operational patterns and ROx perspectives: what do I put in, and what comes out? For example, when handoffs stall, response times fluctuate, rework increases, or the overall effectiveness of interactions declines.

These things resonate immediately because no one needs to translate them. They are already in the language that leadership thinks in: costs, risk, customer behavior. Many CX professionals conclude from this that the problem is communication. Better presentation. Clearer visualizations. A dashboard that fits on one page. At best, that gets you halfway there. Rather, the issue is understanding the causal relationships behind effects and contextualizing measures.

An Accenture representative summed this up in a formula in a 2020 Harvard Business Review article that immediately resonated with me*: “Most leaders say they’re customer-centric, but if everything they measure is company-centric, how could that be true?”

His answer was the Customer Performance Indicator, or CPI. KPIs measure what the company wants to know. CPIs measure outcomes that customers themselves value. Time. Effort. Reliability. Clarity. How quickly someone can solve their problem. How often they have to follow up to get there. The CPI label may be secondary, especially since it is hardly established in practice, at least as far as I can see.

The idea does hold up, though.

For one of our B2B clients, that is exactly what we tried to do. We linked customer data to operational systems: lead times, handover points, process disruptions, website performance, and First Resolution Time. We then looked at where along the journey experiences take shape and show up in customer behavior. Loyalty, repeat purchases, referrals, but also the opposite: silent churn, declining order volumes, and increasing escalations.

The guiding question was always the same: What impact do these experience points have, functionally and emotionally?

What we found surprised us. The high-impact moments were hidden in the ordinary, scattered across the journey. They only revealed themselves when we considered the customer perspective and operational reality together, in context.

One of these moments was so inconspicuous that we had overlooked it at first. And it changed more than all the dashboards we had ever built.

The next episode is about what it was and why no one had noticed it before.

*The Most Important Metrics You’re Not Tracking (Yet), by Gene Cornfield (Harvard Business Review, 2020)