Forrester recently published Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) rankings for brands in the United States and Canada. As part of our annual Customer Experience Benchmark Survey, we surveyed 98,363 consumers in the United States and 43,324 Canadian consumers, asking about their likelihood to recommend brands they interacted with in the past 12 months as a measure of customer loyalty.
Our analysis revealed:
- Overall scores suffered deep decline. NPS fell significantly for the majority of industries for both countries. NPS improved for only one industry in each country: airlines in the US and auto/home insurers in Canada. Interestingly, the investment industry is the only industry in both countries that maintained level NPS performance.
- Scores declined across the board. A higher percentage of brands (36% in each country) had significant decreases compared to drops in 2023. For the majority of brands, NPS remained stable and a small proportion of brands (6% in the US and 4% in Canada) improved.
- Many previous industry leaders prevailed. Despite drops in NPS, many industry leaders retained their top spots by continuing to outperform competitors. Top-ranked brands in 11 of 13 US industries remained on top, as did leaders in three of nine Canadian industries in the study.
What to do next:
- Don’t compare these scores to the ones you measured internally. Even if you measure NPS internally, we don’t recommend comparing your scores directly to ours (or other third-party national benchmarks). It is not an apples-to-apples comparison, since survey methodologies and sampling differ. In most cases, the NPS you measured will probably be higher than an NPS derived by a third party such as Forrester, partly because people tend to be more candid when responding to blinded third-party surveys. Instead, focus on trended information. Ask yourself if your company’s scores are moving in the same direction as your industry or key competitors. Are your scores improving at a faster rate? These answers will be more useful than simply looking at absolute scores.
- Keep in mind that NPS measures loyalty, not CX quality. If your company uses NPS to gauge the success of the customer experience (CX) program, bear in mind that NPS is a loyalty metric, not a direct measure of CX quality. It is only effective at improving CX when it’s part of a CX measurement and improvement system that measures the performance of your customers’ journeys. The Net Promoter Scores in this report are more like relationship Net Promoter Scores than transactional Net Promoter Scores. As such, they tell only one part of your customers’ stories.
- Dig more deeply to understand drivers of customer intent. Understand key drivers of NPS and performance on specific journey-level moments of truth to more directly help you identify opportunities to improve your CX. Link information from more targeted studies, seek unsolicited and unstructured sources of customer feedback, and link to internal operational data. All of these provide additional perspectives to what happened as your customers engaged with your brand. Don’t neglect broader factors that impact customer perceptions and what they value, including your organization’s culture, employee experience, and marketplace conditions. The impact of these factors are explored in this recent Forrester report.
Let’s Talk
Forrester clients can schedule a guidance session with me to discuss how to interpret these scores and next steps for improving CX quality.
