Five CX Performance Elements that Turn Your Customers Off 

Every interaction your customers have with your business leaves an impression—some positive, some negative. While great customer experiences build loyalty and trust, inevitable missteps can quickly turn customers away. Understanding what frustrates your customers and addressing those pain points is key to improving your customer experience (CX). Based on over 20 years of analyzing customer feedback, we’ve identified five specific CX performance elements that consistently drive dissatisfaction. In this blog, I will explore these common pitfalls and provide insights on where to focus your improvement efforts.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of giving a talk at the AED Summit on what we have learned from our twenty-plus years of helping companies measure, manage, and improve CX. In my previous blog, I shared the five CX performance elements that excite customers.  In this blog, I want to share those performance elements that turn customers off.  It is quite interesting and provides ideas on where to focus your CX improvement efforts.     

How Did We Discover These Five Elements? 

Customers will tell you a lot if you listen.  And listening is 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 these two questions:

1. What went well with this experience?
2. What could have been better.

Verbatim responses are captured and tagged appropriately. We use analytics to help us understand the whys behind the score.

What Could Have Been Better?

For this blog, I will focus on the What Could Have Been Better side.  Below is an image showing the results from within our online platform. For example, on the left-hand side, 22.45% of those responding to this question mentioned Communication as something that could be better. The five performance elements I discuss account for 73% of all mentions. Collectively, this group that mentioned any performance element had an NPS® of 79.6%.  Those customers who mentioned a performance factor that could have been better had an NPS of only 61.30%. 

For example, customers who mentioned Communication as a performance factor that could be better had an NPS of 47.1%.  Customers who mentioned ease of doing business as something that could be better had an NPS of 36.2% or an NPS that was 25 points lower than the overall NPS for the group of 61.3%.   Both performance elements are turnoffs for customers.   

Analyzing at the Numbers Differently 

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

Five performance elements strongly influence how a customer views a service experience. These are: 

• Communication 
• Ease of Doing Business 
• Knowledge and Professionalism of Staff 
• Service Completed When Promised 
• Accuracy of Order 

Note that Pricing is the most frequently mentioned as something that could be better, but the NPS for those customers who mentioned it was only 3.5 points lower than for the entire group.  We see this pattern across all the industries we serve.  If other things went well, the customer only wanted a lower price! 

Other than Communication, the other four performance factors significantly impact customers’ NPS ratings.  In the case of Knowledge and Professionalism and Service Completed When Promised, the NPS impacts were -36 and -28 points respectively.  Quite significant.   

Ease of Doing Business gets so many mentions on both the positive and negative ledgers.  If you are easy to do busy with, it’s a winner.  However, if you make it difficult, customers won’t like it!    

Lastly, don’t focus on everything if you want to improve CX at your company.  Understand what performance factors customers grade you highly on, as these are potential marketing points.  On the areas for improvement, focus on the critical few.  You may be unable to focus on all five, so concentrate on the more important ones for your customers first.  Improving performance on these five things will help your B-to-B company improve CX, and your customers will love you for it! 

If you have any questions or comments about this blog, please send me an email or post them below.

All the best for 2025.  

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