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Five CX Performance Elements that Excite Your Customers 

What makes customers truly delighted with their service experiences? After analyzing years of customer feedback, we’ve uncovered five key performance elements that consistently excite and engage customers. These elements not only enhance customer satisfaction but also significantly boost Net Promoter Scores (NPS)®.

I recently presented at the AED Summit, where I discussed lessons from two decades of helping companies measure, manage, and improve CX. Today, let’s explore the five CX performance elements that make the biggest impact on your customers and why focusing on these can transform your customer experience strategy.

The 5 CX Performance Elements 

Customers will tell you a lot if you listen.  And listening is exactly what we have been doing in our work.  More specifically, here is how we did it.   

  • Following a quantitative question (generally overall satisfaction), we ask the following two questions: 
  • What went well with this experience? 
  • What could have been better? 
  • Verbatim responses are captured and tagged appropriately  
  • We use analytics to help us understand the whys behind the score. 

For this blog, the focus is “Went Well” side; the next blog, I will cover “What Could Have Been Better.”  

Below is an image showing the results from within our online platform. For example, on the left-hand side, 16.52% of those responding to this question mentioned communication. The five performance elements I discuss account for 75% of all mentions. Collectively, this group that mentioned a performance element had an NPS of 79.6%.   

cx performance elements, report, what went well and what could have been better

However, those customers who mentioned “Communication” as a positive performance factor had an NPS of 89.1%.  Customers who mentioned ease of doing business had an NPS of 92.2%.   Both performance elements are real customer exciters. 

Look at the Numbers Differently 

I decided to look at the numbers differently and compare the number of mentions in the chart below with the impact on the NPS score.   

There are really five performance elements that strongly influence how customers view their service experiences.  These are: 

  • Ease of Doing Business 
  • Communication 
  • Knowledge and Professionalism of Staff 
  • Friendly/Caring/Professional Staff 
  • Quality of Service 

There are a few things to note. First, delivering service with a caring and friendly touch matters. Customers want to feel that their provider has their best interests at heart, and this result highlights that point. As you hire and develop frontline staff, ensure they embody that caring and friendly demeanor that makes for a better customer experience.   

Second, it is no surprise that “Ease of Doing Business” gets so many mentions and positively impacts NPS.  All of us want things to be easy!  This is one of the reasons Amazon has been so successful—it is downright easy to do business with them.   

Lastly, if you want to improve CX at your company, don’t focus on everything; focus on the more critical few. I suspect that improving performance on these five things will help your B2B company improve CX significantly, and your customers will love you for it! 

If you have any questions or comments about this blog, email me or leave them below (we need to add a comment section if possible).   

All the best for 2025.  

“Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.”

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