I’ve been reading a lot about NPS bashing, and its impending death and replacement in 2025 thanks in large part to Gartner predicting more than 75% of organizations would abandon the metric by 2025.
But here’s the real problem: we’re asking a single metric to solve problems that require culture and strategy.
As I noted in a LinkedIn post earlier this year, NPS was never meant to be your entire CX strategy. It’s a barometer, not the whole weather system.
If you’re expecting any single metric to fix customer experience, you’ll be disappointed every time. Yet, I have seen many organisations use one metric to determine the success/failure of their entire CX program. You guessed it. NPS.
The Uncomfortable Truth We’re Not Discussing
The actual issue isn’t NPS. It’s that CX teams over-rely on metrics while under-investing in the strategy and culture that drive real improvement.
We wanted magic beans. We got mad when the beans were just… beans.
Consider this: Forrester reports that customer experience quality has been in a “multiyear downward trend” globally. In 2025, 21% of brands declined in their CX rankings, only 6% improved, and 73% remained unchanged. In North America specifically, 25% of brands saw their CX decline while only 7% improved.
This is happening despite two decades of NPS adoption, CX maturity models, and countless measurement initiatives.
The problem? We’ve been measuring religiously but not acting strategically.
What We Ask NPS to Do (That It Can’t)
Organizations use NPS as:
- A reporting metric (what it’s decent for)
- A diagnostic tool (what it’s terrible at)
- A substitute for customer understanding (dangerous)
- A proxy for CX maturity (lazy)
We measure NPS religiously but don’t act on it systematically. We celebrate score increases without understanding WHY. We panic over decreases without understanding WHAT CHANGED.
Here’s a real-world example: A B2B company maintains a high NPS score throughout the customer lifecycle. Their service team is responsive, their account managers are attentive, and customers rate them highly. But when renewal time comes, customers shop around anyway—because the product didn’t deliver the promised business outcomes.
Would the vendor have noticed the renewal risk by relying solely on NPS? No. The score showed high satisfaction with service and overall experience, but it completely missed that the solution failed to solve the customer’s actual problem.
That’s not NPS failing. That’s expecting NPS to tell you something it was never designed to measure.
The Copycat Trap: Measuring What Competitors Measure
Here’s where things get even worse. Organizations don’t just misuse NPS—they implement it for the wrong reasons entirely.
The CX FOMO effect: “Our competitor tracks NPS, so we need to track NPS.”
The boardroom pressure: “Show me the same metrics as [industry leader].”
The consultant playbook: One-size-fits-all measurement frameworks copied from case studies.
The real question no one asks: “Does this metric help US achieve OUR north star?”
Your competitor’s metrics dashboard is optimized for THEIR business model, THEIR customers, and THEIR goals. Copying it is like wearing someone else’s prescription glasses—you might look smart, but you can’t see.
Think about it: A growth-focused SaaS startup needs activation rate, time-to-value, and expansion revenue metrics. A premium service brand needs emotional connection metrics and lifetime value indicators. A retention-focused subscription business needs customer health scores and churn predictors.
NPS might be perfect for one of these businesses and completely wrong for another. The point is: your measurement system should be as unique as your business strategy.
Yet I see this constantly—CX teams building dashboards based on what they think they should measure, not what they need to measure to drive their specific goals.
What Actually Matters: The Right Hierarchy
Here’s the hierarchy that works:
Culture first: Do you care about customers, or just scores?
Strategy second: Does your CX strategy evolve as your business grows and your customer base changes?
Metrics third: Are metrics helping you make better decisions, or just giving you something to report?
Collaboration always: Is your metrics dashboard built WITH the teams who need to act on it, or imposed ON them?
North star alignment: Does every metric on your dashboard have a clear line of sight to your organizational goals?
Let me be clear: This hierarchy applies regardless of whether you use NPS, CSAT, CES, or any other metric. The measurement tool is irrelevant if the foundation is broken.
The Five Questions Before You Add Any Metric
Before implementing ANY metric—NPS or otherwise—answer these five questions:
- What specific decision will this metric inform? If you can’t name a concrete decision or action, don’t measure it.
- Which team will act on this data? Metrics without owners are vanity metrics.
- How does this connect to our north star? If it doesn’t tie to growth, retention, expansion, or whatever your primary goal is, it’s noise.
- Do we have the capability to act on what we learn? If you discover a problem but can’t fix it, why measure it?
- If this metric moved 20 points, would we do anything differently? If the answer is no, remove it from your dashboard.
If you can’t answer all five, don’t add the metric. It doesn’t matter if it’s NPS, if your competitor uses it, or if Gartner recommends it.
The Real Problem: The Gap Between Measurement and Action
Here’s a diagnostic test for your measurement strategy: What’s the average time between when you collect feedback and when you take meaningful action?
If it’s more than 30 days, your metrics are decorative.
According to Survicate’s 2025 benchmark data, the median NPS score remained flat at 42, but this masks some dramatic industry-level changes. Ten out of eleven industries saw NPS decline—some by double digits. Healthcare dropped from 71 to 61. Retail & Ecommerce fell from 68 to 55.
But here’s what’s interesting: these aren’t failures of measurement. They’re failures of response. Companies were measuring, they were seeing the signals, but they weren’t acting fast enough or strategically enough to reverse the trends.
The score isn’t the problem. The system around the score is the problem.
The Path Forward: Augmented Intelligence, Not Replacement
I’m not saying stick with NPS forever and ignore everything else. I’m saying stop looking for a silver bullet metric and start building a measurement system that serves your strategy.
This means:
NPS as one signal in a constellation of insights—not the sun around which everything orbits.
Pairing quantitative scores with qualitative understanding—the “why” behind the number matters more than the number itself.
Moment-based measurement alongside relationship metrics—understanding both the journey and the destination.
Behavioral data + survey data + operational data = actual insight—one source of truth is rarely the whole truth.
Cross-functional collaboration on what to measure—your metrics dashboard should be co-created by CX, Product, Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Finance, not dictated by one function.
This is where AI and advanced analytics can help—not by replacing NPS, but by connecting the dots between NPS, operational metrics, behavioral signals, and business outcomes.
Is Your Metric Strategy Actually Working?
Here’s how to diagnose whether you have a measurement problem or a strategy problem:
Signal vs. Noise Test: Are your metrics helping you make different decisions, or just confirming what you already do?
Evolution Test: Has your measurement framework evolved as your customer base and business model have changed? Or are you still measuring the same things you measured five years ago?
Action Gap Test: What’s the time between measurement and meaningful action? If it’s more than 30 days, your metrics are for reporting, not improving.
Ownership Test: Can every team member explain how their work connects to the metrics on your dashboard? If not, you’re measuring the wrong things or not communicating effectively.
Most organizations fail at least two of these tests. The ones that pass all four? They’re not arguing about whether NPS is dead. They’re too busy using it effectively as part of a broader system.
Stop Building Better Barometers. Build Better Weather Systems.
The revolution isn’t finding a better metric. It’s:
- Building systems that connect measurement to action
- Creating cultures that value understanding over scoring
- Developing strategies that use metrics as inputs, not outputs
- Designing measurement collaboratively across teams, aligned to your unique north star
- Recognizing that hard work has no shortcuts
- Having the courage to measure differently than your competitors
Your metrics dashboard should tell the story of YOUR customer journey toward YOUR business goals—not be a photocopy of your competitor’s investor deck.
The Bottom Line
NPS isn’t broken. Our expectations of it are.
We expected it to be strategy. It’s a measurement.
We expected it to drive change. It reports on change.
We expected it to work without context. It only works within a system.
The organizations succeeding with CX aren’t the ones who abandoned NPS first. They’re the ones who never expected it to do the heavy lifting of culture and strategy in the first place.
So, the next time you read that NPS is dead, ask yourself: Is the metric really the problem? Or is it that we’re still looking for magic beans when what we need is to do the hard work of building culture, strategy, and systems that serve customers?
Stop blaming the barometer for the storm. Start building the weather system that makes your business resilient.
What’s your take? Are you rethinking how you measure CX for 2026? I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments.
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