This is a really dangerous question that can lead your CX efforts astray and waste your time. If you don’t believe me, bear with me… does this feel familiar?

  • You are doing all the “best-practice” things: measure NPS at relationship level, CSAT in key journeys and ease at the touchpoint level. You try to show how CX drives the business and why your team is valuable.
  • But stakeholders don’t seem to care about customer issues you identify or about movement in CX metrics. And they tell you that what you report isn’t “actionable” enough.

This is the quagmire you get stuck in when you assume other organizations’ metrics should become your metrics.

The best CX metric isn’t NPS, CSAT, or Ease. It’s the metric that shows whether you are getting closer to a CX performance objective.

That means you need to know where you’re trying to go in the first place – a step that’s missing in many organizations I observe. And there’s a second step between defining a CX objective and choosing a CX metric that teams often skip, too. I’ll get into that below.

AI makes this already urgent problem even more urgent. That’s because AI makes skipping steps easier than ever: Ask Copilot, Claude or ChatGPT for “best-practice” CX metrics and you’ll get an answer in seconds. But easier access to other companies’ metrics doesn’t make those metrics right for you. This is one of the dysfunctional CX measurement practices I mentioned in Will AI Fix Your CX Measurement Or Make It Worse?

Why Are “Best-Practice” CX Metrics Dangerous?

Leaders and CX teams often reach for familiar metrics because they feel safe: “Nobody was ever fired for using NPS.” But familiarity doesn’t mean fit. A standard metric may not tell you whether you’re making progress toward the CX performance objective you’re after.

Standards like satisfaction, NPS or ease may be perfectly reasonable choices in some situations. But if you want customers to feel confident, for example, neither standard measures confidence directly. They may correlate with it, but that doesn’t make them measures of confidence.

Familiar metrics also come with baggage: embedded assumptions about what differences in scores mean. With NPS, for example, treating promoters, passives, and detractors as meaningfully different groups assumes those classifications correspond to differences that matter to your business. With standard metrics, you inherit those assumptions.

Unfortunately, once you’ve chosen a metric, it is hard to undo. Leaders become attached to trend lines, teams learn how the metric behaves, benchmarks, targets, and incentives accumulate around it.

But Don’t We Need Standard CX Metrics So We Can Benchmark?

Only when the metric fits. Comparing the wrong metric with competitors simply creates more confident misdirection. You may use a standardized metric for external comparison while relying on different metrics internally. Also, many so-called standard metrics aren’t standardized – data collection methods and sample strategy.

The only way to do a real benchmark is to do a double-blind survey and in one of those you can include any metric and benchmark it.

How Do We Know What The Right CX Metric Is?

The right metric captures evidence that shows whether you are getting closer to your objectives. That’s why metric choice starts with the objective, not the metric. But don’t jump from objectives straight to metrics. There is one more step.

Think about health.

  • If you ask your doctor, “What’s the right metric for health?” you might end up with familiar measures like weight or blood pressure. They aren’t bad measures. But are they the right measures for what you want to achieve?
  • Say you want to get stronger. Now you have an objective. Next ask: What evidence would convince me that I’m getting stronger? Perhaps you can lift heavier weights, perform more repetitions, or gain muscle mass. Only then do you choose the metrics that capture that evidence.

CX measurement works the same way. You need to ask two questions:

Step 1: Which CX performance objective do you want to achieve?

A broad business goal isn’t enough. You need to translate it into a CX performance objective: a clear statement of how the customer experience needs to change to help achieve that business goal.

  • Business goal: What does the business need to achieve? This comes from your overall business strategy. Identify the direction the business is trying to go. For example, your organization needs to reduce churn.
  • Desired customer behavior: How would customers need to behave for you to achieve that business goal? Pinpoint desired and undesired customer behaviors. For example, more customers need to stay.
  • CX performance objective: What would customers need to experience for the desired behavior to become more likely? Don’t describe what you plan to do. Describe what customers will experience if you succeed. Performance measurement expert Stacey Barr calls this a “future fact.” For example, your analysis may show that customers who leave experience high friction and perceive your products as less useful. Your CX bet might therefore be: Customers can work with us without unnecessary effort and find our products useful.

With a CX performance objective, you’re still not ready to choose a metric.

Step 2: What evidence would help you track if you are making progress toward that objective?

Just as with getting stronger, first ask what evidence would convince you that you’re making progress.

  • Evidence: What evidence would convince you that you are getting closer to your objective? Identify the strongest evidence, then assess what’s feasible to collect. For example, evidence of when customers can work with you without unnecessary effort, they might tell you that working with you feels easy, call for help less often, abandon fewer journeys, or rage-click less. If most customers work digitally, the strongest evidence may be in digital behaviors and overall perceptions of ease.
  • Metrics: Which metrics can capture that evidence? Define each metric precisely, including its definition, data source, calculation, and the decisions it will support. For example, you may define a digital analytics frustration score to measure effort at the touchpoint level and analyze perceived effort through a relationship survey. To apply this to your situation, use Forrester’s Metrics Design Tool And Template as a guide.

Reality Check: Do You Have A Measurement Problem Or A Strategy Problem?

Don’t rely on Copilot, Claude or ChatGPT to produce your CX metrics for you. Start with your CX performance objective instead, and use AI tools to help you and stakeholders explore the evidence and metrics that could show whether you’re making progress.

If you have a good CX strategy, much of this work is already done: The strategy defines how the customer experience needs to change and why. If you’re struggling to decide what to measure, you may not have a measurement problem. You may have a strategy problem. And “be customer-centric” isn’t a strategy – you can – and need to – do much better but we have CX strategy research and tools for you.

What’s Next On Your Journey To Making Your Metrics Work For You Again?

Read my blog Will AI Fix Your CX Measurement Or Make It Worse?

If you have Forrester Decisions access, dive into all the details, recommendations and exampples in these reports and request an analyst call with me:

Follow me on Forrester and on LinkedIn.

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