Many customer experience scorecards still reward speed, resolution, and efficiency. Pasquale DeMaio, Vice President at Amazon Connect, says those measures are no longer enough on their own.
They can show that a company closed an interaction. They do not always show whether the customer felt understood, whether they came back, or whether the experience strengthened the relationship.
The first article in this series - Amazon Connect Customer Targets the CX Problem Brands Still Miss - explored why mediocre customer service can quietly erode loyalty. This piece looks at the harder question for executives: how should they measure the experiences that drive customer loyalty?
For COOs, CCOs, CMOs, CROs, CIOs, and Chief Data Officers, the answer starts with accepting that the old service dashboard only tells part of the story.
AWS is tying that measurement shift to the latest Amazon Connect Customer launches, which are designed to help organizations build, test, and improve AI-powered customer experiences with more customer context and greater business control.
If leaders want to measure advocacy, relevance, and repeat engagement, they also need tools that help teams design experiences around those outcomes, rather than simply optimize individual service interactions.
CSAT Still Matters, But It Can Miss the Middle
DeMaio does not argue that traditional service metrics should be thrown away. CSAT and Net Promoter Score can still reveal obvious failures and exceptional wins.
The problem is what sits between those extremes.
Surveys tend to capture feedback from customers at the extremes, those who are often very happy or very unhappy, and reflect a single point in time rather than real-time, in-the-moment signals. They can miss the larger group of customers who complete an interaction, feel little emotional connection to the brand, and quietly change behavior over time. DeMaio framed the limitation of legacy measures clearly:
“They point out the places where you probably have the most egregious challenges or the best wins.”
That leaves executives with a measurement gap. A company may know when it has delighted someone or failed badly, but still miss the slow drift of customers who remain technically served and emotionally unmoved.
The risk is rather awkward; a dashboard can look stable while customer preference weakens.
Measure Engagement Across Every Touchpoint
A modern CX scorecard needs to move beyond the closed interaction. DeMaio said leaders should study whether customers continue to engage with the business after service moments.
That includes whether they return to the website, open relevant communications, contact the company again about the same issue, buy again, or appear to change their normal pattern of behavior. Asked what executives should measure, DeMaio pointed to the customer’s ongoing relationship with the brand:
“Look at every touchpoint and start to measure the repeat engagement of the customer.”
That shift is important because customer experience does not only live in the contact center. It shows up in marketing emails, mobile apps, order updates, returns, delivery notifications, billing journeys, sales conversations, and post-service follow-up.
A customer who contacts support three times about the same problem may still be marked as “resolved” in three separate systems. A customer who stops opening emails after a frustrating service moment may not show up in a service dashboard at all.
Executives need a connected view of these signals because customers experience the company as one relationship, not a set of departmental workflows. Quite inconsiderate of them, but there we are.
Advocacy Requires a Broader Data Model
DeMaio argued that organizations need to bring customer signals together before they can draw useful conclusions from them.
That does not mean collecting data for its own sake. It means understanding whether the business is serving each customer in a way that feels relevant.
He pointed to content engagement, website visits, repeat contacts, purchasing patterns, and post-interaction behavior as useful signals. He also described the need to understand customers at a more individual level, including “segments of one,” so that follow-up feels useful rather than mass-produced.
In practical terms, a CX scorecard should combine operational measures with relationship measures. For some organizations, this may sound obvious; unfortunately, for many, this is a new concept.
Executives may still track speed, handle time, resolution rate, containment, and cost. But those should sit alongside measures such as repeat engagement, customer effort, repeat contact, personalization relevance, escalation quality, retention behavior, and advocacy signals.
A resolved interaction answers one question. A broader engagement model asks whether the customer still wants a relationship.
AI Changes What Leaders Can See
AI matters here because it can help organizations analyze more interactions, connect more signals, and identify patterns that would otherwise stay hidden.
DeMaio said Amazon Connect Customer has allowed organizations to analyze conversations for several years, but he described that as a powerful yet narrower view when compared with the wider customer relationship.
AWS’s newer direction with Amazon Connect Customer is to bring data from more touchpoints into a customer profile, analyze behavior over time, and help teams understand whether customers are still engaging with the business.
That creates a different measurement opportunity. Leaders can move from sampling small slices of experience toward understanding more of the customer journey.
The latest Amazon Connect Customer capabilities are intended to support that broader view by helping teams use AI and customer context across more of the experience lifecycle.
