Customer Loyalty Metrics

As a D2C founder, I used to worship the NPS score until one customer changed everything for me. Every board meeting, someone asks about Net Promoter Score. Every investor deck has a slide on Customer Satisfaction scores. We also track store NPS religiously and have dashboards for everything. Then something happened that no metric could have predicted. A customer started writing me emails to tell me how our mattress changed his sleep, back pain, and his mornings. He recommended The Sleep Company to everyone he knows. No NPS survey captured this man. He’s not a data point, and he taught me something I should have learned earlier. Here's what actually tells me our customers love us: → Some customers buy a second and a third mattress for their parents and loved ones.  → Our Surat store outsells metro locations when the sales associate speaks Gujarati → A family drove from a Tier-3 town to visit our store because their neighbors recommended us None of these show up on a dashboard. Here's what I've realized after building 170+ experience centers: 📍NPS tells you if customers are satisfied. Stories tell you if their lives are impacted.  📍Retention rates don’t count the uncle in Jaipur who told his colony to switch mattresses.  📍CSAT scores can’t measure the relationship with a customer who writes you letters. The best customer data is in the stories your store managers share over chai. It's in the WhatsApp messages your CRM team forwards at midnight. I'm not saying stop tracking NPS. Metrics are necessary. Track them, but don't forget that there's always a better measure which doesn't appear in data. Is there an incident when a customer pleasantly surprised you?

Are your marketing BFFs lying to you? Ad Recall and Aided Awareness. Heartbreaking news: Yes! Consumer research, along with meta-analyses spanning hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign investments, suggests that increases in these metrics do not necessarily reflect a meaningful shift in brand perception, consideration, or purchase intent. There are three important reasons why. More on those below. But first, consider why platforms love these metrics: they tend to increase as long as media delivery is functioning properly. No matter what you do, there is often a lift. Sometimes a very large one: +14 points! That also explains why agencies and less-experienced marketing teams gravitate toward them. Who wants to be the bearer of bad news when the dashboard is full of green, green, GREEN numbers? The problem is that a metric can move without the brand meaningfully moving. I’ve been exploring better indicators of genuine brand influence, and I recommend that other marketers do the same. The implications extend across brand purpose, campaign objectives, creative strategy, especially creative strategy, and measurement design. Done well, this shift can lead to stronger brands, more resilient growth, and better financial outcomes. I know, I know: I’m asking you to give up the empty calories. And empty calories are fun. But in return, I’m offering something better: faster career progression for you, and higher profits for your employer. It is time to give up your fake "BFFs". 🙂 #Marketing #Analytics

We love a tidy metric. Something to track, benchmark, and present to the execs. For a lot of teams, that’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), a single number that promises to measure customer loyalty and predict growth. But I don't care much for NPS. Sometimes, it reflects customer service more than the actual product. Worse, it can be gamed without improving the business. I worked at one company where execs pushed to get NPS up to 90. We did it — by burning out our CS team processing refunds who were coached on extreme niceness. Oh, and churn definitely didn't come down. Our mistake? Chasing sentiment instead of substance. We spent more time nudging customers for positive survey responses than actually fixing the problems driving churn. Growth rarely comes from a higher NPS score. It comes from improving onboarding, reducing time-to-value, and strengthening the product itself. If I could do it over, I’d focus less on NPS, and more on metrics that actually signal growth: - Activation rate - Renewal rate - Expansion or average order value Those tell a much clearer story about progress — and they're a lot harder to game.

Employees often miss what #CX is about, so I have an ice-breaker activity I've used at the beginning of #CustomerExperience workshops. Now, I offer this idea to you: At first, this will seem obvious and perhaps unhelpful, but stick with me, please. The activity is to have small groups spend 10 minutes discussing what drove their satisfaction and dissatisfaction with recent air travel. No, the outcomes will not be surprising—but that hides a really important point that will shake up participants' expectations and attitudes. Of course, everyone says the same things in this exercise. "I was satisfied because we arrived on time." "The snacks were better than expected." "The seats were surprisingly comfortable." "The flight attendants were attentive and pleasant." And, on the other side, "I was dissatisfied by delays." "Communications about flight changes were poor." "The seat was cramped and awkward." "The staff was grumpy and indifferent." I'll spend a few minutes collecting the drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Everyone will nod in agreement. And then comes the point of this exercise: Absolutely no one will say that a driver of satisfaction was that the airline flew them six miles in the air and delivered them to their destination safely. In other words, the CORE experience--and the most important priority of any airline--drives virtually nothing in terms of customer relationships. Getting there safely is expected, not a driver of satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. That's the "aha." Whether you're talking to a group of healthcare workers who think their only essential function is reducing mortality and morbidity or a room of telecom execs who feel everything hinges only on uptime, the message is that it's not what we do but how we do it that drives differentiation, satisfaction, and loyalty. We all can become so focused on the delivery of our primary product or service--or achieving the chief KPIs--that we can neglect to understand the experience from the customer's perspective. Forcing people to consider their own experiences and perceptions as customers helps them to perceive that air travelers landing safely (or patients having successful surgeries, or your phone service working) isn't what drives differentiated CX and outstanding loyalty. Don't get me wrong—you can't miss the table stakes. An airline isn't forgiven for lax safety because it has fresh nuts, nor is a telecom company pardoned for unreliable service thanks to rapid call answer times. But delivering table stakes is not what drives the kind of rabid loyalty, sales, and margin enjoyed by brands with differentiated CX. Ensuring people realize this before introducing them to customer-centric concepts and practices opens their minds to new possibilities within their existing job roles.

So I was watching a friend try to buy new running shoes last weekend - overwhelmed by countless options, technical specifications about "pronation control" and "energy return," while sales associates kept pushing the most expensive pairs. And in my head all I could think of was instead of asking "How do we sell more shoes?" why are they not asking "How do people want to buy comfort?" This is the essence of demand-side thinking - understanding the full context of your customer's struggling moment. What causes people to buy isn't random chance. There's this myth in sales that customers are unpredictable, that they "randomly" stop by or make "impulse" purchases. But that's just an excuse for not understanding causation. The customer who says "I bought this mattress on impulse" has usually been struggling to sleep for years! Great salespeople recognize these five truths: 1. Humility: You can't just assume you know why people buy 2. Causality: Nothing is random - everything has a cause 3. Tradeoffs: People will sacrifice something to make progress 4. Disconnection: Most customers don't consciously connect their actions to their deeper motivations 5. Self-deception: People build stories that fit their worldview ("I'm buying this for health" when they've made no other healthy choices) When you flip your lens and start mapping the entire timeline of how people buy - from first thought to ongoing use - you create a sales process that matches how people naturally make progress in their lives. Once you stop pushing features and start serving as a guide through your customer's journey, you're no longer selling at all. #DemandSideThinking #MarketingStrategy #ConsumerPsychology #ProblemSolving #CustomerJourney

Unpopular question - Your customers like you, but would they miss you if you disappeared tomorrow? Businesses often assume that customer satisfaction equals customer loyalty. If your customer is coming back to you, all must be well! But there's a hidden risk here - satisfied customers leave quietly when something better comes along, often catching businesses completely off guard. When customers merely "like" your business, they are vulnerable. Without an emotional connection, customers don't hesitate to switch at the first hint of convenience, price drop, or new competition. This quiet churn erodes growth, shrinks profitability, and forces companies into costly battles to constantly acquire new customers. The antidote is not better products or cheaper prices. It is genuine customer delight. Delight creates powerful emotional bonds. It turns customers into your biggest advocates, ones who won't just stay but enthusiastically bring in others. The reason is very simple. Because it connects deeply to human emotions like appreciation, pride, and belonging. It goes far beyond transactional satisfaction. Here are a few simple yet impactful things you can start doing today to move customers from 'like' to 'love': ✴️ Personalise the small interactions: Simplest, yet the most powerful one. Address customers by name, recognise and remember preferences, and let them know they matter individually. ✴️ Surprise your customers in tiny ways: Joyful and unexpected gestures go a long way. You don't have to be a Ritz Carlton. Even a small process made easy, a genuine follow-up call, or a handwritten note. There are a million little ways to create powerful emotional anchors. ✴️ Empower your team to delight: Allow your employees the flexibility and freedom to create small moments of joy for the customers. ✴️ Celebrate customer milestones: Acknowledge customers' personal achievements and special moments. Show them that the relationship goes beyond sales. Which of these do you practise regularly in your business? Want your team to master the art of understanding, delighting, and keeping customers loyal? Let's connect.

We stopped tracking NPS (Net Promoter Score) at lemlist, and I believe this indicator could disappear in the future. After working in 5+ software startups, I've come to the conclusion that NPS is not worth what it costs in terms of User Experience. Why? 1/ NPS puts undue pressure on users. As product builders, our role is to delight users and offer a smooth experience without constant interruptions. Instead of disturbing users every five minutes to gauge their happiness, we should focus on those who are naturally inclined to offer feedback. 2/ No real business decision is made leveraging NPS score The main problem with NPS is its lack of statistical representation. At lemlist, we have a sizable customer base of 25K. With three surveys annually, that equates to 75K surveys, but with only an 8% response rate, we get about 6K responses, or roughly 500 per month. Whenever NPS was fluctuating month over month, we couldn't tie that to anything specific that changed, nor draw useful conclusions. In smaller SaaS businesses with, say, 1K customers, the response might be as low as 20 per month, making it impossible to draw reliable conclusions from NPS variations. 3/ NPS rarely offers new insights. The benefit of NPS lies in receiving continuous qualitative feedback (NPS Comments). But as we regularly interact with our users and use the product ourselves, we already knew all the feedback, and nothing was really a surprise. The drawback is that it can create noise and make you prioritize some features just because 2 people mentioned it in an NPS comment in the same week. Therefore, I find NPS to have a higher cost for Users vs. what it really brings in terms of decision-making. Instead, we’ve implemented an Annual Customer Survey, which yielded over 300 detailed responses. Users evaluated our product (8.1/10) and customer support (8.8/10). They helped prioritize our 2024 feature roadmap by rating & ranking our ideas. This approach has proven far more valuable, and I anticipate even greater participation now that we're not overburdening users with frequent NPS surveys. We will keep the in-app "Provide feedback" CTA and maintain an up-to-date database with Users who are keen to provide feedback. ➡ I’m curious to hear from those who find NPS invaluable: what business decisions have you made based on NPS that you wouldn’t have otherwise?

If I could eliminate one widely accepted practice in customer experience, it would be this: Our obsession with vanity metrics. Net Promoter Score Average Handle Time Service Levels. Here's the problem: These metrics tell part of the story, but they're not THE story. They're disconnected from actual business outcomes. Example: Your service levels hit 85% (answering 85% of calls in 20 seconds). Great! But did you: → Sell more? → Resolve more problems? → Increase customer lifetime value? → Reduce churn? You don't know. NPS asks "How likely are you to recommend us?" But there's no correlation between a high NPS score and whether that customer will actually buy again or remain loyal. It's a feeling in the moment, not a predictor of future behavior. What should we measure instead? Metrics connected to business outcomes: → Sales and retention rates → Problem resolution (did we actually fix it?) → Customer lifetime value → Effort of escalation (can customers easily get help when needed?) Too many CX initiatives fail because they cost too much money without generating measurable business benefits. They don't reduce costs. They don't increase sales. They don't extend customer loyalty. They just... cost money. The bottom line: Vanity metrics create a false sense of success while the business suffers. Measure what matters to the business, not what makes us feel good about our performance.

The reason most products fail isn't a lack of customer research — it's the wrong unit of analysis. Pain points, needs, need states, personas — these frameworks all share a fatal assumption: that understanding what people are dissatisfied with tells you what they'll do next. It doesn't. Dissatisfaction is a necessary condition for change, but it is not the cause of change. What I've come to understand after thirty years of studying how people actually make progress is this: people don't buy products. They hire them to move from a life they're struggling with to a better one they can imagine. That act of hiring — that's the unit of analysis everything else misses. Here's the invariant underneath all of it: human beings will always seek progress. That doesn't change with technology, demographics, or market cycles. What changes is the context — the specific moment when someone says, "I can't keep doing it this way." This is where Jobs to be Done departs from every traditional framework. Pain points describe what hurts. But people live with pain for years without acting. Need states describe what's missing. But unmet needs don't predict when someone will move. Personas describe who someone is. But the same person hires completely different solutions on different days depending on what's happening in their life. The thing that surprised me — and still surprises teams I work with — is that the cause of every purchase is a story with four forces acting on a person simultaneously. There's the push of the current situation becoming intolerable. There's the pull of a new possibility they can see. And working against both are the anxiety of the unknown and the habit of the present. When push and pull exceed anxiety and habit, people switch. Not before. This is mechanism, not metaphor. And it changes everything about how you build, market, and compete. In product development, it means you stop designing for feature requests and start designing for the struggling moment — the interior experience of "this isn't working anymore" that precedes every search for something new. In marketing, it means you stop broadcasting benefits and start narrating the story your customer is already living — because they don't need to be convinced they have a problem. They need to see that you understand the one they've already admitted to themselves. In strategy, it means you stop segmenting by demographics and start segmenting by the circumstance of struggle. Your real competitors aren't who you think — they're every other way a person resolves the same struggling moment, including doing nothing at all. The received wisdom says: understand your customer's needs and fill them. The real model says: understand the causal structure of progress — what pushes, what pulls, what holds people back — and design the entire system around that. Think deeper, care more — makes for bigger impacts.

Rethinking NPS: Measuring Customer Experience with Caution We all want to understand how positive customer experience drives future revenue — and one of the most commonly used metrics for this is Net Promoter Score (NPS). While NPS offers a simple and scalable way to gauge customer sentiment, it’s far from perfect. Critics have pointed out several limitations: 🔍 Lacks diagnostic value 📉 Over-simplifies customer sentiment 🔄 Assumes ‘recommendation’ = loyalty or growth 🎯 Susceptible to bias 🌍 Influenced by cultural and industry differences 📊 Often misused as a performance metric ⚙️ Plagued by inconsistent methodologies Use NPS carefully. It can be a helpful directional indicator — but not the whole story. To truly understand your customers and improve their experience, combine NPS with: ✅ Qualitative feedback ✅ Journey-level insights ✅ Operational and behavioral data Customer experience is complex. Let’s measure it with the depth it deserves. #CustomerExperience #NPS #CXStrategy #Growth #CustomerInsights #Marketing #Leadership