Your CX Score Could Be Lying to You

By Monica Belmana, Director, Growth at Material

Why Today’s Experience Leaders Need a New Measurement Playbook

For years, customer experience teams have lived and died by their scores – NPS, CSAT, CES, star ratings, review volume and more. A rising number means the program is working. A dip triggers a fire drill. Executive dashboards glow green or red, and teams steer toward whatever metric is deemed “the one that matters”. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: A strong CX score doesn’t guarantee a strong customer experience, and a weak CX score doesn’t always explain what’s really broken.

In a world where expectations shift faster than most organizations can operationalize change, traditional CX measurements simply can’t keep up. Scores reveal an outcome, but not the plays, decisions, signals or frictions that created it. The scoreboard isn’t the strategy.

If your CX metrics look stable, or even great, but loyalty is slipping, acquisition costs are rising or engagement feels stagnant… your score might be lying to you.

The Pressures on Experience Measurement

Experience leaders today face a paradox: customers have never had more channels to make their voices heard, yet organizations have never found it harder to decode what their feedback truly means. The result?

• Feedback sits in silos. A survey lives in one platform, call-center transcripts in another, social listening in a third. Signals scatter across teams who rarely connect the dots.

• KPIs feel detached from business reality. Many dashboards track sentiment but not behavior, cost-to-serve or financial impact.

• Insights show up too late. If your data tells you that a customer had a poor experience last week, you needed to intervene yesterday.

This is why so many companies report the same frustrations: “We have data, but it’s not actionable”, “Our program isn’t moving the needle”, “Leadership doesn’t see the ROI”. The issue isn’t a lack of feedback. The issue may be measuring the wrong things; or measuring the right things too slowly.

What Leading Brands Do Differently

Across industries – from retail to financial services to travel – we see a new breed of CX leaders rewriting the measurement playbook. They don’t treat CX as a reporting function. They treat it as a learning system.

These brands:

Listen across every touchpoint.

It’s not just about post-purchase surveys, but also behavioral signals, digital friction points, operational data, employee insights and unstructured feedback.

Use AI-powered analytics to make sense of the noise.

Modern experience engines surface patterns across channels, personas and journeys before they show up as drops in loyalty or revenue.

Connect CX performance to real financial impact.

Experience metrics mean little without understanding how they influence spend, retention, lifetime value and cost to serve. Consider an example:

When one automotive client asked us which KPIs actually predicted revenue, our analytics teams linked two years of CX data with financial and behavioral records. The model forecast revenue within 1%. Suddenly, their entire CX strategy aligned with financial reality, not gut instinct.

Act in the moment, not months later.

With real-time triggers embedded in CRM or loyalty platforms, the best brands close loops quickly, rescuing customers, rewarding advocates, nudging hesitant buyers or resolving emerging issues before they snowball. This shift from “measurement” to “moment-to-moment orchestration” is where competitive advantage lives now.

Case Study: When the Score Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

A services company had been running the same CX program for years. Scores were consistently high, and the dashboard suggested everything was working. Yet business performance, informal customer comments and operational patterns did not line up with the numbers. Something felt off.

Once we stepped back and assessed the full journey, the issue became clear. Survey questions were overly broad and favorable, disconnected from real behaviors and misaligned with how customers described the experience. The program was missing the moments that shaped customer confidence, friction and expectations. It also failed to capture tolerance levels that distinguished minor inconveniences from real pain points.

Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative insight, we rebuilt the measurement system around the behaviors and moments that mattered. The pilot revealed issues the old program had never surfaced. Frontline teams gained clear direction, customers stopped commenting on the survey itself and trust in the data increased. The company moved from a comfortable, reassuring score to a system that helped teams truly learn, respond and improve in ways the legacy program could not.

What Today’s CX Leaders Really Need

The experience landscape is evolving, and your measurement system must evolve with it. Based on hundreds of programs we’ve built, run and optimized, modern CX requires:

A unified listening engine.

Centralize survey data, digital intercepts, call center signals, social conversations, operational metrics and loyalty information in one ecosystem.

Real-time intelligence.

Replace static dashboards with adaptive insights that alert teams when something shifts.

Financial linkage and predictive modeling.

Tie experience to outcomes that matter: churn, acquisition efficiency, NPS-driven growth, operational cost and lifetime value.

Journey orchestration; not just journey mapping.

Use triggers to anticipate needs, personalize experiences and guide the next best action in the moment.

Human understanding at the core.

Metrics only matter when grounded in motivations, identity, habits, barriers and emotions. Scores summarize the past. Human understanding predicts the future.

How Material Helps Experience Leaders Get Ahead

Material builds experience systems, not just dashboards. We bring together behavioral science, data science, market research, design and advanced CXM platform expertise (Qualtrics, Medallia and more) to help brands:

• Identify the moments that matter most to loyalty and spend.

• Link experience performance to financial impact.

• Embed real-time triggers into CRM, loyalty and digital platforms.

• Strengthen organizational responsiveness and close loops faster.

• Transform measurement from reactive responses to strategic initiatives.

• Build long-term systems that evolve with your customers – not behind them.

Our team doesn’t hand you templates, we co-create measurement strategies that fit your brand, your journeys, your customers and your business model, because you don’t need another score; you need a system that moves the score.

So, here are the questions every experience leader should be asking:

1. If your CX score went up tomorrow, would you know why?

2. If it dropped, could you see the early signals before it happened?

If your answer is anything less than “yes,” your CX score might be lying to you.