Most Enterprises Will Discard NPS as a Success Measure by 2025

Businesses across industries will abandon NPS and switch to other valuable CX metrics to positively evaluate customer services and support, reveals Gartner.

By the end of 2025, more than 75% of marketing leaders will dump Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a measure of victory regarding customer service and support, reports Gartner. Customer service and support leaders are aiming to build the case to remove NPS from their post-transaction surveys due to the evolving challenges linked to making its data actionable.

In this digital marketplace, NPS is a commonly used key performance indicator (KPIs) across organizations globally. However, it has been repeatedly failing to provide actionable insight regarding customer service to business leaders.

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Deborah Alvord, senior director analyst at Gartner Customer Service and Support Practice explains – “The broad language used in the NPS metric captures customers’ intent based on their evaluation of more than just customer service, making it difficult to identify what actions customer service should take to improve performance.”

In fact, other factors that make it tricky for customer service and support leaders to act on NPS involve the price or quality of a product. This often confuses the root cause of customers’ evaluation. Consequently, customer service is left with a lack of relevant insights, bringing about to waste time and resources analyzing NPS results from the transactional surveys.

Regardless of such challenges, marketing leaders believe NPS is the finest indicator of loyalty. According to another Gartner survey, almost 58% of customer service leaders are required by their company’s executive leadership to measure NPS.

In reality, CEOs use it for talking points and competitive positioning with their investors, making it trickier for professionals and business decision-makers to move executives away from that perception. Even 33% of business heads are either unsure or disagree with the fact that NPS is valuable for customer service.

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As a result, Gartner recommends business leaders need to consider certain factors to effectively measure service and support CX –

• Utilizing and drawing attention to other customer service experience measures by evaluating customer service performance at an interaction level is the need of the hour. This could be done by capturing more actionable metrics – including customer effort score (CES), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and value enhancement score (VES).
• Building the case to de-prioritize NPS within customer service from post-interaction surveys in customer service is crucial. It needs to be created by shifting the focus to other customer service metrics which provide enhanced actionability.
• It is important to adapt NPS for customer service to measure by identifying customer-service-specific influencers and root-cause drivers of NPS while de-prioritizing its importance.

“To move executives away from this perception, service and support leaders must begin using more valuable customer experience (CX) metrics than NPS,” mentioned Deborah Alvord. “If, however, executive leadership requires NPS to be measured, it should be done in a way that meets expectations but doesn’t overvalue the importance of NPS in customer service.”