Maybe… if Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) earns a “yes” on each of these five questions: Does it align with your business goals? Does it help improve CX? Will customers accept it? Will stakeholders embrace it? And is it practical to use, including for benchmarking?

That seems like a lot to ask, but unless you do, your CX beacon metric can start working against you.

Most organizations don’t pick a CX beacon metric this way. Instead, they ask two questions: 1) What’s a “best-practice” beacon metric for CX?; and 2) Which metric can we benchmark easily? But these questions will lead you astray.

Don’t Choose A Beacon Metric Because It’s Easy To Benchmark

Asking which metric can be benchmarked is the tail wagging the dog. The sequence should be reversed: First define your CX objective, then identify the metric that provides the evidence you need to know whether you’re making progress. Only then ask how to benchmark it. If two metrics serve that purpose equally well, the ability to benchmark more easily can be the tie-breaker. And keep in mind that proper benchmarking requires a double-blind survey — which means you can include any metric and benchmark it.

Don’t Let A “Best-Practice” Beacon Metric Define Your Strategy

This doesn’t mean you should stop using NPS or other standard metrics as CX beacon metrics. But you must stop treating them as a substitute for a strategy.

Many organizations have ambitions like “be customer obsessed, deliver a seamless omnichannel experience, or be more proactive.” They sound inspiring but are vague and full of “weasel words.” That makes them hard to understand and measure.

Rather than recognizing this ambiguity as a problem, leaders often reach for a familiar North Star or CX beacon metric. But when goals are vague, the metric fills the vacuum.

Say your ambition is to “be customer-centered” and you choose J.D.Power as your beacon. You have effectively “outsourced” your strategy to J.D.Power: The external metric defines what this ambition means because leadership failed to define it first.

Don’t Let A Poorly Matched Beacon Metric Distort Your CX Progress

Even when your CX objective is clear, the wrong beacon metric can pull the organization away from it. NPS, customer satisfaction, or another established measure may be right for your organization. But it becomes a liability if it doesn’t meaningfully represent your CX objective and connect to business outcomes.

Whichever metric you designate as your beacon will inevitably attract attention and improvement efforts. The worse the fit, the greater the drift. Teams may improve the metric without advancing the goal or advance the goal without improving the metric.

If your CX objective is that customers feel confident or that they trust you, but your North Star is NPS, customers may become significantly more confident or trusting while recommendation scores barely change. The organization may conclude that little progress was made. In reality, it improved exactly the outcome it intended to create.

The risk grows when the beacon metric gets cascaded throughout the organization. Small disconnects between the metric and the goal become amplified at each layer.

How Should You Pick Your CX Beacon Metric?

Push back on executives who believe they’ve already provided sufficient direction when they declare, “We want to be customer-centered by 2030!” and ask you to execute. The aspiration sounds clear — the destination isn’t. You must help leaders define what that aspiration means for customers and the business and turn it into CX performance objectives concrete enough to guide decisions and measurement. Only then should you debate which beacon metric will tell you whether you’re making progress.

Use the Excel tool in our report, How To Select The Right CX Beacon Metric, to identify the right CX beacon for your organization or to validate that you’ve already found it. The tool guides you and your stakeholders through answering all five questions.

If you want to discuss more and are a Forrester client, request an analyst call.

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