For years, customer experience research has revolved around two familiar metrics: NPS and C-SAT. They became the default language of CX dashboards and boardroom slides. But NPS was actually designed to simplify customer sentiment into one powerful question: Would you recommend us?
Although NPS works as a quick indicator of customer experience, it falls short when customers behave in ways that don’t match their own answers. A customer may recommend a brand but still switch to a competitor after one frustrating interaction. Research shows that 32 percent of customers stop doing business with a brand after just one bad experience. That number is even higher in industries like retail, telecom, and financial services, where switching requires only a few taps.
As a result, relying only on these single-number metrics creates blind spots. CX leaders today want to know not just what happened, but why. To better understand and manage customer expectations, businesses need to adopt newer, more innovative measurement frameworks that move beyond surface-level metrics and offer a complete, continuous, and actionable view of the customer experience.
The Experience Economy Demands More
Modern customers have endless choices and zero patience for mediocre interactions. A customer who gets lightning-fast delivery from an e-commerce brand now expects the same efficiency from their bank, their telecom provider, and their healthcare app. This cross-industry benchmarking means companies can’t hide behind slow processes or legacy systems.
For many customers, immediate response is critical too. According to recent industry reports, as many as 90% of buyers say “immediate response” is crucial when they have a support question.
A smooth, reassuring, or thoughtful experience drives higher loyalty and encourages people to spend more whereas a moment of dissatisfaction can push them to abandon even a brand they’ve used for years. This emotional layer plays a huge role in decision making, yet most traditional CX metrics miss it entirely.
To understand customers today, customer experience research needs to go beyond simple scores and measure emotions like trust, ease, reassurance, and a sense of value. These emotional drivers often explain why customers stay, why they leave, and what truly sets one brand apart from another.
Without understanding these drivers, leaders end up solving the wrong problems or doubling down on actions that won’t move the needle.
CXi: A Smarter Way to Measure and Manage Customer Experience
To help brands close the customer experience gap, Borderless Access created CXi, a new framework designed to decode the “why” behind behavior by looking beyond isolated metrics and capturing a fuller picture of the customer journey.
CXi is built on four essential pillars that shape modern customer experience:
- Performance – How well the brand delivers on core promises.
- Advocacy – How strongly customers recommend the brand to others.
- Reconsideration – How likely customers are to switch, drift or rethink.
- Competitive Advantage – How the brand stacks up against key rivals.
Instead of treating each pillar as a standalone score, CXi blends them into a holistic, weighted index that reflects true customer sentiment and future behavior. This creates a more accurate, predictive view of loyalty.
CXi also goes deeper than top-level numbers. It maps the exact drivers that influence sentiment—speed, price, communication, ease, trust, experience quality—and identifies how the brand performs on each one. This allows CX teams to see precisely where friction occurs and where upgrades will have the strongest business impact.
The framework also includes loyalty segmentation, which clusters customers based on behavior, not just answers. CX teams can see who is truly loyal, who is at risk and who could grow with the right nudge. This makes every action more targeted.
How CXi Helped an E-Commerce Leader Uncover Hidden Experience Drivers
The real strength of CXi lies in its ability to move brands from “what happened” to “why it happened” and finally to what to do next.
Instead of vague directions like “improve service,” CXi delivers attribute-level action plans. For example, if satisfaction is high, but reconsideration is rising, the framework highlights whether the issue is pricing clarity, support responsiveness, or competitive noise. CX teams see whether the problem lies in design or execution and can act accordingly.
The distinctive nature of CXi was further highlighted when a leading e-commerce company partnered with Borderless Access to gain a clearer, more holistic view of how key stakeholders experienced its platform.
Instead of relying on isolated satisfaction scores, we applied a broader measurement approach that aligned with the pillars behind our CXi framework. Through targeted digital surveys we assessed performance, advocacy, reconsideration triggers and competitive positioning across sellers, advertisers, AWS stakeholders and delivery partners.
The insights revealed clear experience drivers: sellers prioritized lower fees even over broader reach, delivery partners needed stronger and more consistent training updates, and competitors were outperforming the brand on specific experience attributes.
By tying these findings back to what influenced loyalty and switching behavior, the company was able to pinpoint which improvements would have the greatest impact. The result was a focused strategy that strengthened customer relationships, sharpened competitive advantage in the B2B segment and drove measurable business growth.
Future-Ready Businesses are Rethinking Customer Experience Research
The future of CX belongs to brands that measure continuously, adapt quickly and act with precision.
Episodic measurement is no longer enough. Customer expectations shift by the day, and the brands that succeed are those that can track sentiment in motion. CXi gives businesses the clarity to do exactly that. It brings together performance, emotion, competitive positioning and behavioral signals into a single, actionable framework.
In a world where experience defines loyalty, Borderless Access empowers brands with a 360-degree view of customer experience, making it a foundation for sustainable business growth.
If you’re ready to elevate your customer experience strategy with deeper, more actionable insights, connect with our experts today.
