Editorial
The Gist
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Beyond NPS metrics. Customer experience metrics are evolving. Companies are shifting from traditional NPS to more comprehensive measures for deeper insights.
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AI enhances CX. AI and sentiment analysis are helping businesses analyze customer emotions and anticipate needs.
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Holistic measurement. A successful CX strategy integrates both quantitative and qualitative metrics, and it aligns with overall business goals.
Net promoter score (NPS) has long been a standard benchmark used by organizations across industries to measure customer satisfaction, gauge performance and identify a customer’s likelihood to recommend a company. However, as customer experience evolves, so too do the CX metrics that we use to measure its success.
In 2025, as experience-first digital strategies take center stage, businesses are looking to move beyond NPS and embrace a more comprehensive suite of customer experience metrics that provide deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences. While Net Promoter Score has been a major benchmark for a long time, there are other ways in which organizations can measure their performance and customer relationships this year and beyond.
Table of Contents
- The Limitations of NPS in Today’s CX Landscape
- Emerging Customer Experience Metrics
- How AI and Technology Are Transforming CX Measurement
- Building a Holistic CX Strategy for Maximum Impact
- Core Questions Around Customer Experience Metrics
The Limitations of NPS in Today’s CX Landscape
NPS, while valuable and trusted for many years, offers a limited view of customer sentiment. In general, it’s a straightforward metric that asks customers how likely they are to recommend a company. This simplicity is both its strength and its weakness.
While responses require almost no interpretation, NPS often fails to capture nuanced customer experiences, provide actionable insights or consider factors like the complexity of customer journeys, especially for businesses who have long sales cycles and hands-on customer service programs.
Emerging Customer Experience Metrics
Organizations are looking to emerging customer experience metrics that not only measure satisfaction but also tie back to organizational goals around growth and long-term engagement. By going beyond a single score, organizations can use additional CX metrics to align strategies with business goals and uncover actionable opportunities for growth.
Here are some of the additional metrics organizations are considering.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES measures how easily customers can complete a task. Whether it’s making a purchase, resolving an issue through self-service or being able to get in touch with someone when needed, these metrics help organizations understand how well they are performing as customers try to accomplish certain tasks throughout their journey. With customer effort being a significant input and driver of customer loyalty, customer effort score is gaining traction as a go-to metric for businesses prioritizing frictionless experiences across digital and physical.
Customer Sentiment Analysis
One of the less talked-about use cases for AI is sentiment analysis. Leveraging AI and natural language processing, sentiment analysis evaluates customer emotions expressed through surveys, social media, customer feedback loops and support interactions. This metric provides real-time insights into customer mood and identifies where users are experiencing highs and lows such as happiness or frustration. With this insight, businesses can pinpoint friction points in the journey and adapt as needed to remedy certain paints or identify areas where there are emerging trends or issues.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Across B2B and B2C businesses, customer lifetime value estimates the total revenue a customer is expected to generate during their relationship with a business. By combining transactional data with predictive analytics, companies can identify high-value customers and tailor experiences to maximize retention and profitability.
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
A common customer service metric used by B2C organizations, FCR measures the percentage of customer inquiries resolved during the first interaction. This metric is critical in assessing the efficiency of customer support and its impact on satisfaction and the overall customer relationship. In 2025, organizations will increasingly look to FCR as a key indicator of operational excellence.
Experience Quality Index (XQI)
As one of the most comprehensive metrics on this list, XQI evaluates the overall quality of customer interactions across various touchpoints. Unlike NPS and other traditional metrics, XQI aggregates qualitative and quantitative data from multiple sources, including CES, sentiment analysis and service response times. XQI provides a 360-degree view of the customer experience.
Related Article: Top Customer Experience Metrics That Matter Today
How AI and Technology Are Transforming CX Measurement
Several years ago, Gartner predicted that more than 75% of organizations would abandon NPS as a measure of customer service success by 2025. Advancements in AI and data analytics are driving this shift beyond NPS, which highlights the growing recognition of NPS’ limitations and the need for more comprehensive feedback mechanisms.
With more organizations focused on centralized data and modern CX tools that can process vast amounts of data, organizations and customer experience leaders have actionable insights at their fingertips, which empowers their teams to make real-time adjustments to CX.
Take predictive analytics as an example. Companies can use predictive analytics to analyze historical data and forecast future behaviors across customer groups. This allows them to proactively identify pain points and tailor interactions to address customer needs before any problems or issues arise.
Related Article: Abandon Hyper-Personalization, Create Tailored Customer Experiences
Building a Holistic CX Strategy for Maximum Impact
Organizations seeking to move beyond NPS need a metrics framework that better reflects the key data and insights from today’s complex customer journeys. A successful customer experience metrics framework should include the following characteristics.
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Integrated metrics: A combination of quantitative and qualitative data for a more nuanced understanding of CX.
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Continuous feedback loops: Implement systems to collect and act on feedback in real time, not just once a year or as time permits.
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Aligned metrics with goals: Make sure that customer experience metrics are tied to broader business objectives, such as revenue growth or customer retention. That’s the cornerstones of a successful measurement plan.
As businesses move beyond NPS, the adoption of diverse customer experience metrics is allowing a richer, more actionable understanding of customer experiences. Metrics like CES and XQI are not just measuring satisfaction. They’re also shaping the future of customer engagement and arming marketing teams with data needed to turn insights to impact.
By embracing these tools and adopting an updated CX measurement framework, organizations can monitor performance and deliver exceptional experiences that drive loyalty, retention and long-term success.
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Core Questions Around Customer Experience Metrics
Editor's note: Here are two important questions to ask about CX metrics.
What are some key CX metrics beyond NPS?
While NPS has been a standard for measuring customer satisfaction, other emerging metrics offer deeper insights into customer behavior. Key alternatives include customer effort score and customer lifetime value. These metrics, along with others like first contact resolution and experience quality index (XQI), help businesses gain a more holistic view of customer experience.
How is AI changing customer experience measurement?
It allows businesses to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently and derive actionable insights in real time. AI-powered tools like sentiment analysis lets companies understand customer emotions through various feedback channels, while predictive analytics helps businesses foresee customer behaviors and adjust strategies accordingly. This shift allows companies to move beyond traditional metrics like NPS and embrace more sophisticated, integrated CX metrics that align with broader business goals.
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