78% of CX pros plan to adopt at least one new metric in 2026
One in three customer experience (CX) professionals say they can’t make a connection between their brand’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) and financial performance, which may explain a desire to seek out other forms of quality measurement based on research published by Medallia.
The Tysons, Va.-based firm, which provides an AI-powered platform to provide CX and employee experience (EX) signals, surveyed more than 1,500 consumers and 550 global CX practitioners to produce its 2026 State of Customer Experience Report.
Medallia’s study, which also incorporated benchmarks from its own programs, found that more is better when it comes to the data sources that inform metrics. For example, 83 per cent of CX pros who use six to nine sources say they can prove ROI versus the 73 per cent who say they use five or fewer. Among those who use 10 or more, 92 per cent say they can show ROI.
Measurement is complicated when CX pros have to take an arms-length approach to seeing what’s happening across an organization. For example, 41 per cent said they worried their CX teams are too siloed from the rest of the organization.
Even when they come back with meaningful insights based on metrics, a lot of CX pros aren’t seeing any momentum: they said one in three departments take no action, and half said their organization doesn’t take action often enough or with enough impact.
Part of the problem could be driven by money woes: 58 per cent of CX practitioners said initiatives are funded from budgets they don’t directly oversee.
“CX leaders must now coordinate efforts across more sophisticated technologies, align departments, and compete for budget, often without an executive sponsor,” the report’s authors wrote. “In many organizations, the methods used to manage CX have not kept pace. This creates gaps in understanding what customers are experiencing and friction in how companies respond.”
360 Magazine Insight
It’s important to remember that Medallia is in the business of helping organizations derive insight from various signals, so it’s in the company’s best interest to promote an approach to CX that spans a wider range of inputs.
This explains why much of the report goes into detail about the diminishing return on surveys, even though many CX practitioners continue to see them as one of the most direct ways to gather critical feedback. Even amid the shift to digital channels (or perhaps because of it) there may be a natural bias towards approaching customers like human beings with questions vs. monitoring other signals.
The consumer findings in the report suggest a growing gap between how brands see their CX versus the general public. Medallia highlighted the mere 16 per cent of consumers who believe experiences got better last year (vs. 66 per cent of CX pros). An even more telling stat might be the 51 per cent of consumers who said brands often believe they are more loyal than they actually are, and that 40 per cent switched brands within the past three months.
It would have been interesting to see more discussion within the report about which signals best support metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT) or customer effort score (CES), as well as an exploration of what new metrics might be emerging.
Still, there is a lot in this gated 34-page report worth looking at, including a detailed examination on the future of AI within CX.
