March 23, 2026
The Metrics That Matter: What CX Stars Measure for Success
Ask a CX leader what they measure and you’ll usually hear the same three: NPS, CSAT, and customer effort. Ask the leaders in the CXM Stars 2026 cohort what genuinely moved the needle, and you get frameworks built for their specific context, metrics tied directly to business outcomes, and in several cases, a deliberate move away from the industry’s standard scores.
Beyond the Survey Score
The clearest sign is that the smartest leaders have stopped treating survey scores as endpoints. They’re the start of a diagnostic process, not the conclusion.
Mark Janssen at Cooperatie VGZ replaced tNPS entirely with what he calls a CXI Framework, a multi-driver measurement system capturing First Time Resolution, Customer Effort, emotional connection (tracked as “JOY”), and five conversation-specific metrics. The result gave frontline teams actionable insight at the moment of interaction, instead of a monthly score to react to. Operationally, this translated into 30 seconds less talk time, 15 seconds less after-call work, record employee engagement, and measurably better member outcomes across the board.
Jenny McCoy at the Irish Management Institute took a similar path in 2025. She overhauled IMI’s Voice of Customer programme and built what she describes as “a set of distinct learning levers that enhance business intelligence and enable us to diagnose issues with greater precision”, explicitly moving beyond satisfaction scores and NPS to understand the actual mechanics of the participant experience.
The pattern is that single-number metrics show something is wrong; however, rarely what or where. The leaders getting the most out of measurement have built systems that do both.
Tying CX Directly to Commercial Outcomes
Several leaders on this list have cracked what many CX professionals still struggle with, and that is connecting experience metrics to numbers the CFO cares about.
Eric Smuda, then CXO at Likewize, a $2B device insurance company, deployed AI-based virtual agents in the call centre that reduced insurance claim filing time by 20% and cut human call volume by 50%, creating a path to $5M in annual savings. He also led a cross-functional recovery effort that saved a $100M account by identifying and systematically resolving 45 critical issues, resulting in a three-year renewal with four growth opportunities attached. These are business metrics with CX at their root.
Linzi Hindle at DHL Supply Chain tells a similar story. Three consecutive years of customer survey response rates above 80%, which is unusual in any industry, and a renewal rate of 97%, up more than 10 percentage points on previous years.
She said: “These metrics are more than numbers. They represent trust, loyalty, and relationships.” But they also represent revenue, and that’s exactly the point. DHL’s board hears about NPS; they act because of renewal rates.
First Contact Resolution as a Strategic Lever
First Contact Resolution appears repeatedly on the list as an underused but powerful metric, which simultaneously improves customer experience and reduces cost, making it one of the few CX measures that argues for itself in a budget conversation.
Faran Niaz built an entire FCR programme for a leading fintech bank, consolidating 700+ call types into actionable categories, defining agent authority matrices, and setting system entitlements accordingly. The pilot delivered double-digit FCR uplift alongside faster turnaround times and a visible drop in escalations, improving CSAT, NPS, and cost-to-serve simultaneously.
His most cited case is moving ADIB from #23 to #1 in national CX rankings and holding that position for seven consecutive years, using FCR acceleration, experience KPIs embedded in executive scorecards, and RACI models that hard-wire accountability between Product, Operations, Risk, and Tech.
At Newstel, Jonas Fandrey expanded traditional CSAT to what he calls XNPS, a measure focused on root causes rather than surface sentiment. His approach combined real-time quality coaching with employee-side measurement: an 89% global manager feedback satisfaction score and a 94.25% survey response rate from staff, which he treats as a leading indicator of CX performance. The logic was that if managers are engaged and communicating well, frontline CX follows. In 2025, that logic held, and Newstel won five UKCCF Awards across employee engagement, leadership, and outsourcing partnerships.
Crafting Measurement Architecture
The most sophisticated measurement work is about building strategies that connect multiple data sources into a coherent picture.
Qubul AlMusaeed at IE Business School designed a “CX Sensor” model for a B2B telecoms environment, integrating relational and transactional VoC, a Customer Experience Index, journey performance data, and operational KPIs into a single structure. As a result, CX conversations moved from reviewing survey scores to discussing experience-led business decisions. She also introduced “silent signals”, qualitative intelligence from structured customer visits and executive listening sessions that surveys simply don’t capture, particularly in B2B, where relationship depth matters as much as transactional satisfaction.
Duc Hoang at Maritime Bank in Vietnam mapped 30 key touchpoints across retail and business customer journeys, then leveraged Qualtrics’ text and voice sentiment analytics, driver analysis, and prediction modelling across 3,000+ frontline staff. The outcomes were specific and trackable: CSAT moving from 92 to 97, NPS from 62 to 84, new customer account openings on digital channels rising from 50% to 70%, and product holdings per customer growing from 2 to 3.5.
The leaders of CXM Stars 2026 share a measurement philosophy that is simple to describe but harder to execute: metrics should drive decisions. The specific KPIs matter less than whether they’re connected to frontline behaviour, commercial outcomes, and genuine accountability.
