Before you celebrate that high Net Promoter Score (NPS)®, ask yourself one question:
“Is this really driving my company’s growth—or just giving me a false sense of success?”
Although NPS has been widely adopted by businesses, relying on it alone is like checking your car’s rearview mirror to navigate forward. By the time you realize something is wrong, it’s already too late. A sky-high NPS score might feel like a victory—until customers quietly start leaving, revenue dips, and you’re left wondering what went wrong.
If you’re serious about customer loyalty, financial performance, and sustainable growth, you need to shift your focus to what actually drives success: leading indicators like Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
A high Net Promoter Score is a positive indicator, but it’s not the ultimate goal. While it signals that you’re delivering a strong customer experience, it’s crucial to understand what NPS truly represents—and, more importantly, how to ACT on it.
First Things First: NPS is what analytics professionals call a lagging indicator—a metric that reflects past performance but does not, by itself, drive success. Improving NPS does not directly create better business results. Instead, success in achieving financial goals comes from focusing on leading indicators, the key drivers that ultimately influence NPS.
Leveraging Leading Indicators
FACT: Although NPS tends to correlate with customer loyalty and financial growth over time, it does not cause it. Growth, in fact, results from the underlying and ongoing efforts to improve customer experience, measured by leading indicators such as CES and CSAT. These metrics provide actionable insights that allow organizations to make real-time improvements that directly influence outcomes.
THEY are the drivers of the outcomes you want most.
Think of these metrics as the trifecta of CX success:
- NPS tells you how likely customers are to recommend you—but it’s a lagging indicator. It measures sentiment after the fact, not what’s driving it.
- CES pinpoints friction in key customer journeys—because if doing business with you is difficult, customers won’t stick around.
- CSAT gives you real-time feedback on customer satisfaction at critical touchpoints, helping you fine-tune interactions before they impact loyalty.
Of course, measurement, by itself, is not enough. The virtue of leading indicators is that they allow you to ACT to influence outcomes. The actionable insights produced by CES and CSAT can be used at two different levels to effectively resolve friction in the customer experience, i.e., the frustrations that can drive customers away.
1. Customer-Specific Issues or “Hot Spots”
A strong closed-loop process is your early warning system—alerting you to customer problems or concerns in real-time so you can take swift action. Your customers won’t wait for you to fix their problems. If you don’t act fast, your competitors will. Every moment of inaction is another step closer to losing them for good – because when customers feel unheard, they’re already halfway out the door. Proactive engagement keeps you ahead of customer issues before they walk away.
2. Organization-Wide, Systemic Issues
Solving individual customer issues is important, but real progress comes from addressing the deeper, systemic problems that impact your business. Just treating the symptoms won’t stop the problem from recurring. Data-driven insights help pinpoint root causes—whether in channels, products, processes, branches, or employees—so leadership can focus on what truly needs fixing. The goal? Long-term solutions that don’t just patch problems but inform action to prevent them from happening in the first place.
A systemic approach drives efficiency by using data to target and eliminate recurring problems. Companies stuck in reactive mode are just playing corporate Whac-A-Mole, wasting time and resources tackling the same issues over and over. Now that’s the definition of inefficiency.
A great NPS means nothing if underlying issues keep customers from sticking around. To drive real, predictable growth—not just a high NPS—you need to tackle both sides of CX friction. And that’s what leading indicators help you do.
Customer Effort Score (CES): Make It Easy or Lose Them
If you want real improvement—not just a flashy NPS—it’s time to focus on what truly drives customer loyalty: ease of doing business.
One of the best leading indicators, Customer Effort Score (CES), measures how easy (or frustrating) it is for customers to interact with you—whether they’re applying for a loan, opening an account, or making a simple transaction. Every potential friction point matters, and CES pinpoints exactly where customers are struggling.
The numbers don’t lie:
- 81% of customers who have high-effort experiences with you will bad-mouth your business.
- 96% of them will leave you for good.
- On the flip side, 94% of customers having low-effort experiences stay loyal—and 88% will do more business with you.
The Simple Truth: If you make life hard for your customers, they won’t stick around. But remove the friction, and they’ll reward you with loyalty – and their business.
Measuring CES shines a spotlight on friction points, allowing companies to make targeted fixes that improve the customer experience where it matters most. The question is simple: How easy is it to do business with us? But the impact is huge—because when customers find interactions effortless, they’re far more likely to recommend you. In other words, CES isn’t just a metric; it’s a direct pathway to boosting NPS and long-term loyalty.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): More Than a Score—It’s Your Loyalty Engine
Like CES, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) isn’t just another metric – it’s a real-time pulse check on how customers feel about doing business with you. Whether it’s a single interaction, a full customer journey (like the loan process), or their overall relationship with your brand, CSAT tells you if you’re winning them over—or pushing them away.
Want customers to champion your brand? You need to get them into the “zone of affection” – that sweet spot where satisfaction turns into loyalty, and loyalty turns into advocacy. Because satisfied customers don’t just stick around; they bring others with them.
Anything Less Than 4.8? You’re Losing Customers.
Data proves it: To turn customers into loyal promoters, you need an overall satisfaction score of at least 4.8 to 4.9 on a 5-point scale. Fall below that threshold, and you’re not just missing out on advocacy – you’re opening the door for customers to walk away. High satisfaction isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the make-or-break factor for long-term loyalty and financial success.
The Bottom Line: The CX Trifecta That Drives Performance
NPS may be the industry’s go-to metric, but on its own, it’s not enough. Boards, stakeholders, and customers don’t care about a single number; they care about results. And the only way to deliver results is by proactively managing the experiences that create loyal customers – not just measuring them after the fact.
To build a CX strategy that actually moves the needle, financial institutions need to focus on the three key metrics that work together to drive customer loyalty and business growth: NPS, CSAT, and CES.
Master the trifecta of CX success—NPS, CES, and CSAT—and you take control of your customer experience, loyalty, and financial performance.
- Stop letting NPS lull you into a false sense of success.
- Start measuring what actually drives loyalty, growth, and financial performance.
- Let’s build a CX strategy that moves the needle—before it’s too late.
Are you in? Let’s talk.
Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
