CX Teams Move Beyond NPS By Connecting Customer Measurement To Growth And Retention

The pressure on CX teams in 2026 is about closing the gap between what customer measurement reveals and what the organization actually does with the information. NPS filled that gap for years by offering executives one simple number that represented the customer without requiring the same analytical effort they applied to financial ratios, throughput metrics, or operational dashboards. That simplicity was the appeal, but it was also the reason the metric stopped driving decisions long before most organizations were willing to admit it.

Sajan Mathew is the Senior Manager of Customer Experience at Autodesk, where he leads CX strategy, measurement, and service design. He has held CX leadership roles across financial services, technology, and SaaS, and has led composite metric development, NPS-to-alternative transitions, and CX measurement transformations at the enterprise level. His read on where NPS went wrong is grounded in presenting customer data to executives for over a decade and watching what actually changed behavior versus what got noted and filed away.

"Leadership has been conditioned to look at the customer from one metric standpoint. They think the only metric that can represent their entire customer base is this one number," he says. The conditioning didn't happen by accident. It was built by a consulting and tooling ecosystem that made NPS simple to measure, easy to benchmark, and lucrative to sell services around.

NPS wasn't built for action

The original appeal of NPS was that it solved a political problem inside the C-suite. Finance had complex ratios. Operations had throughput and efficiency metrics. Marketing had campaign performance. Customer experience had nothing simple enough for an executive to absorb in 30 seconds alongside those other numbers. "Executives just wanted one simple number," Mathew explains. "They thought that when it comes to finance, it's a complex thing. Operations is a complex thing. But customers, it's easy. There's this disconnect."

The 0-to-10 scale compounded the problem by distorting how customers naturally express intent. People don't think in numeric gradations when evaluating whether they would recommend a business. They think yes, no, or maybe. Mathew says the scale introduces artificial precision that most respondents resolve by defaulting to 7 or 8, which maps to a psychological posture of "there's always room for improvement" rather than disloyalty. "If you plot the scoring across the scale, you will actually see a bell curve and the bell appears at 7 and 8. That's where most people think, 'I always want you to improve. So I will always give you 7 and 8.' As a result, every company will have an NPS lower than 10, and the fight becomes to improve the NPS."

The industry that grew around that fight, including tooling vendors, survey platforms, consulting firms, benchmarking reports, and outsourced scoring services, has its own incentive to keep the metric alive. Mathew sees the bubble as burst, but the infrastructure around it remains standing.

Feedback beats the score

In Mathew's experience, the moment NPS stopped being useful happened alongside an observation about what actually moved executives to act. "When I was presenting the score, even when I was talking about the drivers of the score, executives were not making any decision." They were more reactive, he recalls, when he mentioned negative customer feedback about specific aspects of the product. "The score going down didn't matter. But the product quality, and people talking about certain things, sometimes hits leadership's ego. That's when the action is driven."

The lesson is that customer feedback translated into direct product, service, or operational language produces action. Customer feedback translated into a composite score produces a slide. Though the practitioners who have figured this out are already presenting differently, the organizational structures around them haven't caught up.

Intent-based measurement replaces numeric scales

The alternative Mathew advocates for is a shift from numeric scales to descriptive, intent-based questions. Instead of asking customers to rate their likelihood to recommend on a scale, ask them directly: are you likely to recommend, likely to stay, and likely to buy more? "That intent-based measurement has to happen. You're asking them in a very descriptive style. It will tell you their intent. Not the intent hidden behind a number that they like or don't like."

He says likelihood to recommend, likelihood to stay, and likelihood to expand map directly to the business outcomes executives already care about: acquisition, retention, and growth. In a previous role, Mathew built a composite metric around those three factors plus three additional dimensions covering functional usefulness, ease of use, and emotional quality. The composite gave leadership visibility into which dimension was driving any shift, rather than leaving them with a single number and no actionable direction. "If the composite number changes, we know which factor led to the drop."

The change management took a year. The organization adopted it. Then a leadership change brought a new executive who reverted to NPS because it was familiar. "This new leader came and said, 'I don't understand this new model. Let's go back to NPS, because that's what I understand.' And will you drive any decision based on that? The answer is still no."

Customer metrics must become growth metrics

The structural problem underneath the measurement debate is organizational placement. Mathew believes that CX sitting inside marketing is the single biggest contributor to NPS remaining a vanity metric, because marketing's job is acquisition, not product or service improvement. "To acquire, marketing needs a shiny toy, and that is the NPS score. CX teams mostly sit under marketing, and they generate the score, but to win these things, actions have to be taken. Marketing is not the department that takes action."

In his view, the fix is repositioning customer experience measurement as a growth metric with accountable owners across product, service, and operations. "It needs to go from being a marketing metric to a growth-related metric," Mathew asserts. "Decisions are made based on the dollar impact. Are you going to help me make more money or help me reduce cost? As long as you are a for-profit organization, these are the two things that drive any decision."