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In 2021, Gartner made a bold prediction: “More than 75% of organizations will stop using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system by 2025.”
Yet here we are in late 2025, and NPS hasn’t disappeared at all: it remains firmly entrenched across industries.
The question for CX leaders isn’t whether Net Promoter Score (NPS) is alive, but why it’s still alive, how it’s being used and what its persistence says about the state of customer experience measurement. With dissatisfaction rising sharply across North America and teams under pressure to understand customers at a deeper level, the gap between predictions and practice is worth examining.
This article takes a sharper look at why NPS endures, where it’s losing ground and what it means for teams trying to measure and improve real customer outcomes.
Reality-Check: Where We Are Now With NPS
What the Reports Say
If Gartner’s prediction was directionally correct, NPS usage should have collapsed by now. The data tells a more nuanced story.
CMSWire: NPS Priority Falls Sharply
In CMSWire’s 2025 State of the Digital Customer Experience report, NPS didn’t disappear, but it fell sharply in priority. It moved from the second-most popular metric in 2023 to eighth place in 2024. Teams with less mature toolsets were actually more likely to use NPS (43%) than teams with stronger, more effective systems (30%). That paints a picture of a metric that persists, but mostly where teams lack better alternatives.
TELUS Digital/Statista: In Line With Gartner's 25%
A second data point reinforces that downturn. In the Digital CX Priorities 2025 survey by TELUS Digital and Statista, only 23% of U.S. enterprise CX leaders said they were using NPS to measure performance. That’s right in line with Gartner’s projected 25% usage, but it also shows something Gartner didn’t predict: businesses didn’t “abandon” NPS so much as downgrade it within a larger stack of metrics.
Radical CX: NPS Is 'Woefully Inadequate'
In addition, a 2024 Radical Customer Experience report suggested that NPS “isn’t scientifically valid, completely lacks meaningful context, and distills the complex customer experience into a single, woefully inadequate number.” There is even a website devoted to eradicating NPS: NPSIsTheWorst.com.
Related Article: What Is Net Promoter Score (NPS)? A 2025 Roadmap
NPS Fades in a Dissastified-Customer World
Broader signals in the industry point to the same downward shift. According to a recent Broadbridge study of more than 4,000 U.S. and Canadian consumers, 71% say companies need to improve their customer experience, an all-time high and nearly double the share from 2019. That level of dissatisfaction makes it clear that many brands are struggling to stay connected to what customers actually need. In that environment, NPS alone doesn’t give teams enough nuance to understand what’s driving frustration. It captures a snapshot of sentiment, but it doesn’t diagnose what went wrong or reveal which parts of the experience need repair.
Academic research has consistently shown that changes in NPS have almost no correlation with how customers allocate their spending. Timothy L. Keiningham, Ph.D., author of eight books on customer loyalty and marketing professor at St. John’s University, emphasized that the science behind NPS is bad, and "when people change their Net Promoter Score, that has almost no relationship to how they divide their spending."
So where does that leave us?
As CMSWire contributor Jill Grozalsky Roberson explained in early 2025, NPS is no longer the flagship metric it once was. It’s drifting downward, staying alive mostly because it’s easy to benchmark, embedded in dashboards and familiar to leadership.
But it’s increasingly overshadowed by metrics that speak more directly to retention, effort, lifetime value and digital behavior. Even Gartner is rethinking its stance — a June 2025 research note questioned whether NPS should still be benchmarked against competitors at all, signaling a shift in how the metric is being positioned.
Why the Prediction Didn’t Fully Land Yet
Gartner’s argument made sense on paper, but real-world change moves at a very different pace. Metrics don’t disappear overnight, especially in large enterprises where measurement is tied to culture, dashboards, compensation models and executive reporting. Even when teams know a metric is flawed, replacing it is rarely a flip of a switch. It’s a slow shift that touches everything from data governance to leadership expectations.
One of the biggest barriers is ecosystem lock-in; that is, being tied to an entire environment of tools, dashboards, workflows and executive expectations that all assume NPS is the primary metric. For more than a decade, CX software has been built around NPS: survey templates, scorecards, integrations and benchmarks. Removing it means reworking reporting pipelines and retraining teams, but it also means confronting the harder part: getting executives to agree on a new definition of “success.” That is a heavy lift for enterprises already juggling competing priorities.
NPS Is Simply Premature Sometimes
Practitioners see this misalignment firsthand. Sonika Mehta, product manager at Zonka Feedback, suggested that many businesses still obsess over NPS to the point of using it in contexts where it delivers little insight — such as after simple transactions. She compared it to asking someone to “meet the parents” after the first date: a premature question that typically provides answers that are disconnected from any meaningful relationship.
Her point reflects a broader issue: teams often apply NPS in moments where it cannot reasonably measure customer loyalty, leading to scores that misrepresent customer intent.
NPS Can Distort the Signal
Bill Staikos, founder and partner at Be Customer Led (BCL), reiterated the same problem from the service side. He argued that asking a relationship-level question after a support interaction is fundamentally the wrong tool for the job. Service events are transactional by nature; evaluating them through a loyalty lens distorts the signal and encourages teams to chase a number rather than understand what actually improved or degraded: the experience.
Others point to how NPS was positioned in the first place. Sue Duris, principal consultant on interim customer experience and marketing at M4 Communications and a CMSWire Contributor, related that many businesses, particularly in SaaS, were effectively sold the idea that NPS was a silver bullet for customer experience. Teams treated the score itself as the goal rather than using metrics to guide decisions.
She suggested that businesses should focus on what drives real outcomes, rather than defending or abandoning any single metric. This highlights a core issue: NPS didn’t persist because it was perfect, but because many businesses were conditioned to view it as the central indicator of customer health.
There are technical limitations as well. Early researchers examining NPS found that changes in the score have a weak correlation with how customers actually divide their spending, which challenges the idea that NPS reflects true loyalty or buying intent.
Finally, bandwidth is limited. CX teams are managing modernization efforts, AI deployments, case-volume increases and staffing constraints. In that environment, re-engineering a legacy metric — even a declining one — rarely reaches the top of the priority list.
Gartner wasn’t wrong about the direction of the trend. It simply underestimated how long it takes for the old scaffolding to come down.
Related Article: The Future of Customer Experience Metrics: Moving Beyond NPS
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Artificial Intelligence and Its Impact on Performance Metrics
Like any other single technology or metric, AI isn’t replacing NPS, but it is changing how teams use it. Instead of relying solely on post-interaction surveys, which depend on convenience samples and low response rates, many CX teams are experimenting with real-time signals that approximate the same intent as NPS without requiring customers to stop and fill out a form. Techniques such as sentiment analysis and voice analytics can pick up tone changes, word choice patterns, friction signals in digital journeys and behavioral cues that reveal customer satisfaction or frustration as it unfolds.
This type of analysis doesn’t produce a “score” in the traditional sense, but it does give teams a more immediate read on how interactions are landing. It can uncover pain points in minutes or hours after they appear, not days or weeks later. It also captures feedback from the full customer base, not just the small percentage who answer surveys. For many businesses, this richer stream of continuous insight becomes the primary way they understand experience quality, with NPS playing a secondary role as a periodic benchmark rather than the main signal.
What’s Next for NPS?
NPS isn’t disappearing, but it is shifting into a new role. Instead of being the centerpiece of CX measurement, it’s becoming one signal among many: useful in certain contexts, but no longer the sole indicator of customer health. The next phase isn’t about choosing between NPS and newer metrics. It’s about weaving NPS into a broader CX measurement stack that reflects today’s customer journeys.
Better Metrics to Use Instead of (or Along With) NPS
NPS can signal sentiment, but these metrics provide clearer insight into effort, behavior, and outcomes that actually move customer experience and revenue.
| Metric | What It Measures | Why It May Be Better Than NPS | Best Used When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Effort Score (CES) | How easy it was for a customer to complete a task or resolve an issue | Strong predictor of churn and loyalty; captures friction that NPS misses | Support, service, digital self-service flows |
| Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) | Immediate satisfaction with a specific interaction or experience | More context-specific than NPS; better for diagnosing moment-of-truth performance | Post-interaction feedback, service quality checks |
| Retention Rate | Percentage of customers who stay with a product or service over time | Directly tied to revenue and long-term loyalty; avoids self-reported bias | Subscription businesses, SaaS, membership models |
| Churn Rate | Percentage of customers who leave over a given period | Clear financial signal; often correlates more strongly with dissatisfaction than NPS | Subscription and recurring revenue models |
| Task Success Rate | How often customers complete tasks without errors or drop-off | Quantifies usability and journey friction where NPS is too vague | Web, mobile, product analytics, journey optimization |
| Time to Resolution | How long it takes to fully resolve a customer issue | Operationally grounded; surfaces staffing and process gaps better than surveys | Support, ticketing, service operations |
| Behavioral Signals (AI-derived) | Tone shifts, hesitation, friction signals, journey anomalies, intent patterns | Real-time insight without surveys; detects frustration and intent as it happens | Omnichannel journeys, contact centers, digital products |
One likely path is hybrid measurement models — when a business mixes multiple types of customer experience metrics rather than relying on one single score. Many teams are already pairing NPS with digital experience indicators such as task success, time-to-resolution, repeat contacts or behavioral signals pulled from digital analytics. These combinations tend to paint a clearer picture than NPS can offer alone, especially in digital-first environments where sentiment can shift within minutes, not days.
There are places where NPS still works well:
- High-touch interactions where emotional resonance matters
- Benchmarking against competitors in traditional industries
- Executive communication, where simple signals are easier to socialize than complex scorecards
But there are also areas where NPS underperforms, particularly digital self-service, multi-channel journeys and any workflow where a single number can’t capture the subtleties of customer effort.
When to Use NPS
For CX leaders who plan to continue using NPS, the key is to use it correctly. Tie it to specific customer outcomes, connect the score to real workflow improvements and close feedback loops quickly. A stagnant NPS program is just a number on a dashboard; an active one can still drive meaningful change.
When to Use NPS — and When Not To
NPS works best as a directional signal, not a diagnostic tool. Knowing when to rely on it — and when to move beyond it — is what separates reporting from insight.
| Scenario | Use NPS | Avoid NPS | Better Metric to Use Instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evaluating long-term loyalty or brand perception | Yes | No | Retention rate, share-of-wallet analysis |
| Post-transaction or post-support interactions | No | Yes | CSAT or Customer Effort Score (CES) |
| Measuring digital self-service performance | No | Yes | Task success rate, error rate, friction indicators |
| Benchmarking against competitors | Yes | No | Industry CX benchmarks, customer sentiment indexes |
| Diagnosing why a journey or workflow failed | No | Yes | Journey analytics, drop-off analysis, time to resolution |
| Identifying frustration or delight in real time | No | Yes | Sentiment analysis, behavioral signals, voice analytics |
| Communicating simple trends to executives | Yes | No | High-level satisfaction indexes, combined scorecards |
For those considering alternatives, the decision shouldn’t be about trend-chasing. It should be grounded in clear criteria:
- Does the metric link to business outcomes?
- Does it reflect digital behavior, not just sentiment?
- Can teams act on it rapidly?
- Does it reduce guesswork instead of adding more?
The future of NPS isn’t about survival or extinction. It’s about right-sizing the metric within a modern measurement stack and giving it a role that matches what today’s CX teams actually need.
Conclusion: Where NPS Stands Now
NPS was never going to vanish on a schedule, and Gartner’s prediction reminds us how messy real-world change can be. The metric’s hold on businesses isn’t about brilliance; it’s about familiarity, habit and the difficulty of replacing something embedded in leadership culture.
The data shows a clear shift: NPS has lost its dominance, but it hasn’t lost its place. It’s becoming a supporting signal rather than the centerpiece, a quick sentiment check that works best when paired with metrics that help teams understand customers, improve journeys and drive outcomes, rather than just report a score.
