This is the second article in a series on net promoter score (NPS). You can read the first article.
You’ve felt it. I’ve felt it. We’ve all noticed it. And I guarantee either you’ve said it or had someone say it to you.
“Customer service just isn’t what it used to be.”
“Customer service” being the catch-all, layman’s phrase for the general customer experience as a whole; I can’t count how many times someone has said this to me, especially after hearing what line of work I’m in.
Unfortunately, Gen Z cops a lot of the blame on this one. “They’re lazy, don’t know how to talk to people, they don’t care, etc.” But I’d like to go in and defend them and say the decline in customer experience is not their fault. The fault lies at the feet of everyone’s favorite survey question: How likely are you to recommend our product/service to friends or family?
Since the introduction of NPS, its dominance has quietly reshaped how organizations think about customers, and not necessarily for the better. The fact is, experience quality has declined in parallel with NPS’s rise.
What decline?
That’s right, the NPS metric is the reason for that decline that you’ve experienced.
The decline is real! The general CX FEELS more difficult than it once was. There are more steps, more sign-ups, more hoops to jump through, it’s harder to get in touch with a real person to solve your very real problem. Sometimes it just feels like a hurdle too big to conquer with our limited time and bandwidth in our everyday lives. It’s easier to just cancel something, eat the cost, and move on to a different offering. Why bother providing feedback when things seemingly never change or honestly, just get worse?
The research company Forrester points out a “multiyear downward trend” in CX quality globally; reporting “21 percent of brands declined, 6 percent improved, and 73 percent remained unchanged” in their CX rankings in 2025. In North America, 25 percent of brands’ CX rankings declined while only 7 percent improved. Declines were seen across all three CX dimensions (effectiveness, ease, emotion). In the APAC region 37 percent of brands’ CX scores fell, 58 percent remained unchanged.
So no, it’s not just you. Everyone has felt it.
Though let’s give kudos to Europe, which seems to have kicked the trend just a little with a reported 7 percent of brands improving their CX scores, only 2 percent declined, and the rest remained largely unchanged. Could it have something to do with some European NPS scoring that is slightly different to the rest of the world? Eights being a promoter, Sixes are passives.
So, despite recent decades of focus on “customer-centricity,” CX is stagnating and even declining globally. The fact that this is happening in the era of NPS, the supposed “gold standard of customer metrics,” should make us critically pause.
If the rise of the metric designed to help us measure CX is coinciding with a decade of decline, maybe it’s not really helping at all.
How we got here
As a refresher, the NPS question was introduced to leadership teams around the world by Bain & Company in 2003 and board members were immediately hooked. Why? It did (and still does to an extent) the best job at connecting customer “satisfaction” to commercial growth.
Connecting customer satisfaction to a financial metric is probably the biggest pain point across the CX industry. Most CX practitioners (and honestly, most people) understand that if customers are happy, they buy more, stay longer, and probably tell their friends. If they’re unhappy, sooner or later they leave, and sometimes take others with them, which is detrimental for sales and growth. Simple concept, messy data.
CX practitioners have long struggled to translate human emotion and experiences into hard numbers and financial outcomes. Executives don’t invest in “smiles” and “delight”; they invest in growth, retention, and profitability. Before NPS, customer advocates and sales reps were often stuck trying to explain why feelings mattered to revenue. Enter NPS, the cure-all number with catchy labels like “promoters” and “detractors.” It appeared to solve the problem in one fell swoop.
The simplicity and the solution were irresistible. By the mid to late 2010s, everyone was asking the likelihood-to-recommend question. It slowly became an internet joke and then ever so slowly, the CX began to stall.
The timeline
Let’s note that trends take time and there is a long-term effect that a high adoption rate of a certain metric will have.
2003–2010: NPS adoption begins. Companies embrace a customer metric, and CX teams gain board-level visibility for the first time.
2010–2020: NPS grows to become the de facto global metric. Most major organizations embed it in their performance dashboards and KPIs. CX maturity peaks, investment, measurement, and asking, “What effect will this have on the NPS?” becomes a common question.
2020–2025: The cracks appear. Global CX scores begin a sustained decline. Forrester reports four consecutive years of falling CX performance in the U.S., and the 2025 global data confirms the same trend worldwide.
Coincidence? Maybe. But it’s hard to ignore that the widespread institutionalization of NPS and the time it has taken for its influence to reshape how businesses operate, coincides almost perfectly with the gradual erosion of the overall customer experience.
While it’s impossible to say NPS alone caused the decline, it undeniably influenced how businesses designed, measured, and prioritized CX, often valuing perception over reality.
Why is this happening?
The issue isn’t that NPS is bad. It’s that we’ve treated what is inherently a marketing question as if it were a diagnostic tool for experience. NPS is about advocacy, how someone feels about your brand, not the experience, filtered through the lens of word-of-mouth marketing.
On the other hand, other CX metrics measure the moment of truth – what actually happened when a customer tried to solve a problem, buy a product, or seek out your help or services. Did the process make sense? Was it easy? Did it solve a problem or bring joy? It’s those sorts of moments that NPS doesn’t color in for us.
They are not the same thing; and yet we’ve treated them as interchangeable.
We aren’t asking customers about their experience specifically, we’re actually asking them to get into the word-of-mouth headspace first and ask if they’re going to tell people about us. No meal, just dessert.
It could be a better question if we added the simple caveat to the front of the question “based on your experience today, how likely are you to recommend us?” Then we could at least anchor the question to their experience. But in favour of less text and simplicity, we don’t add that part. That’s where the cracks start, which I addressed in a previous article about the overall problem with NPS.
Now, of course, this question alludes to the CX. After all, you wouldn’t be recommending someone if you didn’t have a positive experience, right? Maybe. But it misses some major gaps in understanding what matters to the customer, what makes them stay with you, what makes them buy more, and what makes them a promotor for your business.
And that’s why we’re seeing a general decline of the CX. We stopped asking about it.
What now?
NPS did a few things right. It gave executives a simple, accessible way to connect customer emotion with commercial value. We desperately needed that.
It helped legitimize CX as a serious business lever; and for that I’m eternally grateful. But in simplifying the conversation, we accidentally oversimplified the experience.
Sure, we leave an open-ended text box to “tell us more about your score.” Some customers even use that box. (I see you, thank you!) But how many leaders get into the detail? We still have a long way to go on text analytics programs.
What’s exciting is that many organizations are already taking the brave leap to abandon NPS all together in favour of more robust Voice of Customer (VoC) programs and metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES) or the timeless classic, CSAT.
Companies like Fujitsu, Airbnb, Adobe, and SAP have all notably shifted away from using NPS in favor of bigger and better feedback programs. Over the next few years, they will become the leaders in what a best-in-class VoC program looks like.
If history tells us anything, it’s that when businesses start optimizing for the metric instead of the meaning, the experience inevitably suffers. The next generation of CX leaders will measure better, listen more, and utilize their data to actually improve rather than talk about moving a number.
I can’t wait to see how those trailblazing companies pull ahead of the rest, rapidly improve CX, retention, loyalty, and make natural promoters out of all of their customers… without even having to ask about it.