Is NPS Still the Right Metric for Customer Experience?

Even the founder of Net Promoter Score agrees: it’s time to stop overrelying on NPS surveys and start being smarter about how we listen to customers and evaluate loyalty.

“I’m sick of surveys. I don’t fill them out anymore,” said Fred Reichheld — the founder of Net Promoter Score^℠, or NPS^® — in a mainstage panel at Medallia Experience 2025. “They’ve been abused so horribly and called ‘Net Promoter.’ It’s the worst misbranding.”

A collective gasp was heard in the crowd. It was a big moment for the CX industry, witnessing this public admission from the famous grandfather of NPS.

NPS was once the answer to a complex business problem. Brands used to struggle to link customer satisfaction with loyalty and future growth. Their surveys were overly complicated and failed to tie responses to actual customer behavior, using questions like “How satisfied are you with our overall performance?” and “How likely are you to purchase from us again?”

That all changed in December 2003. That was when Harvard Business Review published The One Number You Need to Grow by Bain & Company consultant “Frederick F.” Reichheld. He revealed how asking just one simple question was the best indicator of business success: Would you recommend this company to a friend? The psychology behind it was clear, grouping respondents into three categories that correlated repeat purchases and referrals with business growth.

After that, CX fundamentally changed. Over the next twenty years, NPS became the golden metric for customer experience teams across the globe. 

Today, however, the world looks a little different. Sure, Net Promoter Score still gives CX and EX teams useful insight, and it can be used in some industries as a general benchmark…But it’s limited. With smarter AI filtering now included in major email clients, survey response rates are in a free fall. Plus, consumers have higher expectations now, and their frustration is more often expressed immediately and indirectly — through an abandoned cart, rage clicks, a bad review, or even their tone when contacting customer service. 

Brands, and their CX leaders, have to move beyond NPS and capture feedback signals from many, many other sources to get the complete picture of the health of their business.

It’s time. Some even say it’s overdue.

What Net Promoter Score Gets Wrong

“Net Promoter is about the simple idea that with every life you touch, you either enrich it or diminish it, and it would be really good to keep track of that,” Reichheld explained during the Experience ‘25 panel. “I think Net Promoter early on made it clear that when you measure that thoughtfully through surveys in a way that’s not biased and gamed, and that really is apples to apples, it explains who’s growing prosperously and generating cashflow, and who’s not.”

Unfortunately, the game isn’t apples to apples anymore. The unbiased, “non-gamed” heyday of tracking promoters and detractors is over. 

Here are three ways that NPS has become a failed promise to predict future profitability:

1. Perfect scores have become virtually meaningless

If you have worked in retail or any form of customer service over the last decade, you know that anything less than a 10 on a survey is considered a failing score. “It used to mean something when my son worked in an Apple store and he got a 10 from a customer and a really nice verbatim. It made him feel wonderful,” said Reichheld during the panel. “Now the world has been trained by car dealers and retailers all over the place that only a 10 is a passing grade, so increasingly there are ‘courtesy tens’ out there. I don’t want to get anybody in trouble — I’m not going to refer you to a friend and I might not even buy more, but I’m going to give you a 10.”

(Conversely, some people glibly give a 0 because they take the question too literally, as this writer says: “I’m a loyal JetBlue customer. The airline sends me a NPS survey after every flight and I give them a zero every time. I’m not dissatisfied — and I have no intention to bad mouth them — I just don’t talk to my family and friends about airlines.”)

In short, consumers don’t consider and respond to NPS surveys the way they were originally designed, which throws the first wrench into making them a genuine indicator of future growth.

2. Low survey participation = low sample size

Statistics 101 tells us that survey responses are, let’s say, questionable without a certain sample size threshold. A small sample size gives us a wide margin of error, and increases the likelihood of false negatives. 

Whether it’s because of the aforementioned email filtering, or ever-prevalent survey fatigue, most brands today are not getting enough NPS survey responses to gamble their entire CX program on, especially when these initiatives can be tied to real business results. 

“[Companies send] survey after survey until response rates are one, two, three percent maybe. The super star says, oh, I get 10%, and you say, wait a minute, that’s a 90% failure rate,” said Reichheld. 

The math doesn’t math with NPS — and that’s pretty risky if it’s still the sole metric in your CX strategy.

3. Teams fail to take action on surfaced problems

For the insights that an NPS survey does uncover — if respondents do go deeper into the survey to add their text or video comments — often, CX leaders do not have a plan in place to take action on them. 

Consumers notice when companies don’t do anything about their feedback (there are entire forums dedicated to this, as yours truly has witnessed many times when evaluating purchasing everything from smart birdfeeders to new vehicles) which ultimately erodes trust, loyalty, and any hope of getting any helpful insight from your customer base in the future.

So, here we are. Net Promoter Scores are now debatable and often poorly applied across CX teams. So why not take the stress and guesswork out of this for everyone — Your customers! CX teams! Detractors on internet forums! — and move on to a much easier, much better approach?

It’s Time for AI & Omnichannel Insights

In the near future, customer feedback won’t be found only in a survey — it will be in a thousand tiny, loud actions and emoji-filled messages across every channel they can find. 

This might sound daunting. That’s a lot of data. But with the right tools in place, your frontline teams, who will be unburdened with low-effort tasks, will be able to head off customer complaints before they even think they have a problem. (This is not science fiction. We’re well on our way). 

To start paving the way to this brighter future, companies need to rethink their current systems and processes. Besides relying on surveys and NPS as the only way to understand and measure the customer experience, the first step is to reframe how you view your contact centers. Then, get your employees on board with smarter AI. Next up: pure customer experience serenity.

From One Number to Every Signal

NPS served its purpose, and changed the game while it did. It gave CX teams clarity, purpose, and a common language. But customer experience has evolved, and so must the ways in which we measure it. 

There is a very exciting future ahead of us, but we have to let go of the past to get there.

Stay tuned for our upcoming blog about how embracing omnichannel insights will look in practice in the largest global service industries. In the meantime, check out our infographic, How to Prove the ROI of CX, which contains real-world examples and hard numbers.