As Goodhart's Law states: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Over the years, NPS has suffered this fate.
Why? Because the metric provoked a culture of hitting targets rather than fundamentally understanding what drives excellent customer experiences.
As a result, many businesses started to only survey happy customer cohorts and tweaked the conventional NPS question to twist their scores.
Such a phenomenon even gave rise to the term "watermelon metrics". These show glossy green scores on the surface but dig below, and they're red raw.
Recognizing this, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) started scoring the NPS of major banks independently in 2021.
The regulators then stipulated that all banks must publish their results, helping consumers see through the mist and uncover which British bank most customers actually recommend.
In doing so, the CMA and FCA forced a wedge between banks and NPS, pushing them to understand customer experiences at a much deeper level to truly move the needle.
These developments underline the need for customer experience measurements that better unpack customer perceptions, processes, and journeys.
Last month, Genesys took a step forward toward that.
A Potential Replacement for NPS?
In releasing The Experience Index, Genesys challenged conventional methods in how businesses monitor and measure customer experiences – including NPS.
The Index tracks customer and employee sentiment and combines that with industry data and benchmarks from the Genesys Cloud CX platform.
As a result, the CCaaS market leader aspires to spotlight insights into where an experience goes wrong and the possible fixes – rather than providing a measly score.
Rebecca Wetteman, CEO and Principal at Valoir, admires this approach. During an episode of CX Today’s BIG News Show, she stated:
Having the ability to see how the changes you make to experiences impact the business and customers – I think that is very powerful.
Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, also notes how such a system will support CX teams as they evolve their CX proposition.
"A lot of the metrics Genesys is focused on will inform the strategy of how businesses roll out systems and help them understand what they have already rolled out incorrectly," she says.
"That addresses the big gap between this picture of Nirvana that vendors love to show us."