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A company checks its NPS (Net Promoter Score a measure of customer loyalty based on how likely a customer is to recommend the company, ranging from -100 to +100). The result: 45. At the management meeting, opinions split into two camps. One side applauds, because the number is positive and comfortably above zero. The other shrugs, having heard that “good” companies score above 50, making this look like an average result not worth celebrating.
Both camps have a problem not with the maths, but with the premise. On its own, 45 says nothing at all. It’s a good score for an insurance company, but a weak one for a telecoms provider. It’s an excellent result for B2B software (businesses selling to other businesses), but below average for consumer electronics. Without a frame of reference, 45 is just a number between zero and fifty that can be read however suits whoever’s reading it.
The evidence here is consistent: benchmarking systematically comparing your own performance against a reference point is one of the most widely used, and most widely misused, disciplines in CX (customer experience). Yet one crucial condition keeps getting overlooked: a comparison only has value if it compares like with like.
Two Different Questions That Often Get Confused
Before a company goes looking for a benchmark, it should first be clear about which question it’s actually trying to answer. There are, in fact, two fundamentally different disciplines that in practice tend to get merged into one.
The first is internal benchmarking comparing the company with itself over time. 41 last year, 45 this year. The question isn’t “are we good in absolute terms,” but “are we improving or declining, and why.” This discipline has one major advantage: it eliminates most of the variables that would otherwise undermine a comparison. Data-collection methodology, question wording, customer segment, seasonality all of that stays (when set up correctly) constant. A change in score then genuinely reflects a change in customer experience, not a change in how the company measures it.
The second discipline is external (industry) benchmarking comparing yourself against competitors or the sector as a whole. The question here is “how do we stack up against other players in the market.” This discipline is more appealing to leadership and marketing, because it provides context on a bigger scale. At the same time, it’s far more methodologically fragile, because it pulls in a whole range of factors that have nothing to do with the quality of the customer experience.
Most companies instinctively gravitate towards external benchmarking, because it lands better in a meeting. “We’re ahead of the competition” sounds better than “we improved by four points since last year.” Yet from a CX management perspective, it’s exactly the other way round: the internal trend is the more reliable and useful indicator, while the external benchmark only has value as a supplement, not as the headline metric.
This is illustrated well by recent trends in data from Forrester, a research and consulting firm that publishes an annual CX Index rating the quality of customer experience across hundreds of brands, industries and countries. According to Forrester’s 2025 rankings, scores fell for 21% of the brands rated globally, improved for just 6%, and stayed unchanged for 73%. In the US it was even more pronounced: for the second year running, ratings worsened for a quarter of brands, while only 7% improved, and among those that declined, the average drop was four points. This continues a four-year downward trend that began after scores peaked in 2021, when the overall CX Index score reached 72 points. Only the 2026 US data showed the first year-on-year improvement since 2021.
What does this mean for benchmarking? If a company benchmarked itself against the industry average in 2024, and that average has been falling ever since, then “being at the industry average” in 2026 means being worse off than the company itself was two years earlier even if its own score has, on paper, stayed the same. An external benchmark without an internal trend can neatly hide this decline. The company reassures itself that it’s “in line with the industry,” while the whole industry slides downward and takes it along.
Why Blindly Comparing Across Industries and Countries Is Misleading
The temptation to compare yourself with whoever happens to have a similar number to hand is strong. A manager reads that Apple, or some other iconic brand, has an NPS above 60, and starts asking why their own company isn’t hitting similar figures. The question is flawed on two levels.
The first problem is the industry itself. Bain & Company, the consultancy that co-created the NPS metric together with Fred Reichheld, runs a benchmarking platform called NPS Prism and states openly on its own site that scores vary substantially between industries, and that a leading score in one sector can be below average in another. Grocery retail follows a different logic of customer relationship than telecoms or banking. According to NPS Prism data, in 2026 grocery chains (based on responses from over 50,000 consumers across more than 40 brands) achieved an average relational NPS of 34. Comparing that figure with a software company or an insurer makes no sense, because a customer has a completely different type of emotional relationship with their weekly grocery shop than with a life insurance provider.
The second problem is geography and culture. A seemingly identical question (“on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us”) doesn’t produce the same response behaviour in every country. Academic research published in the Journal of International Marketing (Van Herk, Poortinga and Verhallen, 2004, replicated by Harzing in 2006) found that respondents in Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Greece) show a markedly stronger tendency towards extreme and agreeable answers than respondents in Northern Europe (the UK, Germany, France) even on entirely identical scales. In research methodology, this phenomenon is known as cultural response bias, and it includes at least two components: the tendency to agree regardless of the question’s content (so-called acquiescence), and the tendency to pick extreme points on the scale. A company comparing the NPS of its Prague branch with its Milan branch is therefore partly measuring not a difference in customer experience quality, but a difference in how people in that culture generally respond to surveys.
This doesn’t mean international comparisons are pointless. It means they require correction, or at least an awareness that raw figures between countries aren’t directly comparable without further context.
A third, less discussed problem lies in the methodology of the benchmarking sources themselves. In preparing this article, data from several commercial providers of industry NPS benchmarks were compared, and the spread of figures for the same industry varied by tens of points between sources. The reason is simple: each provider collects data using a different methodology, over a different period, on a different sample of companies, and often with different question wording. This isn’t proof that benchmarks are useless it’s proof that a benchmark is only ever as good as its methodology, and that blindly adopting a single figure from a single source without checking how it was derived is risky.
How to Find a Comparison That Actually Tells You Something
So the real question isn’t “what’s the industry score.” The question is: who is my relevant reference group, and where can I get data I can trust.
A relevant reference group usually needs to meet four conditions at once. The same industry, ideally at sub-category level, not just a broad sector (retail banking behaves differently from investment banking). The same business model B2B (selling to other businesses) shouldn’t be compared with B2C (selling to end consumers), because the dynamics of the relationship, purchase frequency and drivers of loyalty all differ. A comparable geographic and cultural context, ideally the same market, or at least one with a known, corrected difference in response behaviour. And finally, a comparable data-collection methodology the same or at least similar question wording, the same type of scale, a similar point in the customer journey at which the survey is sent.
As for the sources themselves, there are several types worth considering. Industry associations and chambers of commerce often collect aggregated data from their members and can be a surprisingly good, if less well-known, source, because the methodology is consistent across the whole sector. Commercial benchmarking platforms such as Bain’s NPS Prism or Forrester’s CX Index offer sophisticated methodology and large samples, but they come at a cost, and their data primarily reflects large, often US or Western European markets something smaller, local companies need to bear in mind. Running your own competitive benchmark directly comparing yourself against two or three specific competitors using the same questionnaire sent to a comparable sample of customers is methodologically the cleanest option, but it takes time and often requires working with a research agency. And finally, mystery shopping or auditing a competitor’s customer journey provides qualitative context that numbers alone can’t capture.
The practical recommendation is simple: the smaller and more specific the reference group, the higher its informative value but the lower the availability of data. Most companies therefore need to combine several sources and be transparent with leadership about the degree of uncertainty they’re working with. Presenting an external benchmark as a precise figure, when it’s actually a rough estimate from a heterogeneous sample, is more dangerous from a management standpoint than not having a benchmark at all.
A Benchmark as Motivation, Not an Excuse
The last, and perhaps most important, question isn’t about methodology, but about how the benchmark is used. A benchmark can work in two opposing ways: either as a tool that shows where you need to move to, or as an alibi that justifies standing still.
The phrase “we’re at the industry level” is a dangerous one from a strategic management perspective, because it quietly assumes that the industry level is an acceptable target. As the Forrester CX Index data shows, the industry level has been falling in most sectors in recent years. Being at the industry average therefore often means sharing in a trend of worsening experience along with the rest of the market, rather than maintaining the status quo.
A functional approach uses the benchmark the other way round: the external comparison serves to identify the gap and set an ambition, while the internal trend serves to measure genuine progress towards that ambition. Forrester’s own commentary on the data explicitly states that even a small improvement in customer experience quality can reduce customer churn and increase share of spend. This is the key point: the value of a benchmark isn’t in finding out where you rank in a league table, but in helping you decide how many points of improvement are realistically achievable, and how much of that improvement will actually show up in the business.
In practice, this means running two parallel metrics. Your own trend, tracked with a consistent methodology on a quarterly or half-yearly basis, is the primary indicator of whether CX initiatives are succeeding or failing. The external benchmark, refreshed once a year from a credible source, acts as a corrective lens, telling you whether your pace of improvement is sufficient given what the rest of the market is doing.
The Score Alone Says Nothing
The number 45 hasn’t moved since the start of this article. It’s still 45. But the question of whether that’s good or bad now has a clearer answer: it depends on whether that 45 sits in an industry where scores typically hover around 30, or one where 60 is the standard. It depends on whether the company scored 38 or 52 last year. And it depends on whether the whole industry is currently declining or growing.
Benchmarking in CX isn’t about obtaining a single magic number that can be wheeled out in a meeting as proof of success. It’s about building the frame of reference within which a number is even worth interpreting. Companies that ignore this framework and settle for an isolated score ultimately aren’t answering the question of whether they’re good. They’re only answering the question of whether they like the number.
