Seeing B2B Customer Success Through the Right Lens
For many boards, Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become the default proxy for customer success. It is reviewed regularly, discussed confidently, and often treated as evidence that the organisation is either “doing fine” or “needs attention”.
The problem is not that Net Promoter Score is useless. The problem is that it is over-trusted.
Net Promoter Score tells you how customers describe their experience after the fact. It does not tell you how they navigated the experience in real time, what trade-offs they made quietly, or where confidence was gained or lost long before a survey was completed. By the time Net Promoter Score moves, customers have usually already adapted their behaviour.
Boards rarely fail customers because they ignore them. They fail because they see them too late, too narrowly, or through the wrong lens.
If customer success is to be governed properly, leaders need to look beyond sentiment and toward lived experience. That requires a shift from score-based reassurance to disciplined observation. It requires putting on what we call Customer Spectacles.
Why Net Promoter Score reassures boards — and misleads them
NPS persists because it offers simplicity. A single number. A benchmark. A trend line. It fits neatly into board packs and creates the impression of control.
But customer trust does not behave neatly.
Customers do not experience organisations as averages. They experience them through moments that matter, through friction or flow, through whether things work when pressure appears. Those experiences accumulate into judgment long before a score is given.
NPS captures declared sentiment.
Customer confidence is revealed through behaviour.
When boards rely too heavily on NPS, they risk mistaking silence for satisfaction, stability for confidence, and tolerance for trust. The danger is not that NPS is wrong, but that it is insufficient on its own.
To govern customer success properly, leaders must ask different questions.
Customer Spectacles: a different way of seeing
Customer Spectacles are a discipline, not a metric. They focus on how customers actually experience the organisation and what that experience teaches us about confidence, friction, expectations, and trust.
Rather than asking “What score did we get?”, Customer Spectacles ask:
- What are customers experiencing repeatedly?
- How are they adapting their behaviour?
- Where are assumptions holding — and where are they quietly breaking?
This discipline can be structured around four lenses. Together, they move customer understanding from reassurance to insight.
1. Customer Confidence (Observed)
How do customers behave when they feel confident and safe?
Customer confidence shows up long before it appears in scores. It is revealed through how customers engage, how much reassurance they seek, and how willing they are to rely on the organisation without constant verification.
Common indicators include:
- A willingness to proceed without excessive reassurance or repeated validation
- Reduced need to re-explain context or restate agreed commitments
- Earlier engagement at a more strategic level rather than remaining stuck in transactional detail
Confidence is also tested — and most clearly revealed — through delivery.
- When outcomes are delivered on time and to budget, confidence compounds quietly
- When things go wrong and are fixed quickly, transparently, and without defensiveness, confidence is often reinforced
- When issues are unresolved, delayed, or handled slowly, confidence erodes, even if the eventual outcome is acceptable
One of the strongest indicators of genuine confidence is behaviour that carries personal risk:
- Proactive recommendation to peers or networks, where customers are willing to associate their own reputation with the organisation’s performance
Customer confidence does not show up in speed alone. It shows up in a customer’s readiness to rely on you, to stay engaged when pressure appears, and to stand behind you in front of others.
2. Friction at Moments That Matter (Experienced)
Where do customers experience effort, uncertainty, or anxiety?
Friction is not defined by complaints alone. Most customers do not escalate immediately, and many never escalate at all. Instead, friction reveals itself through behaviour: hesitation, repetition, workarounds, and quiet disengagement.
Common indicators include:
- Points in the journey where customers slow down, pause decisions, or disengage
- Moments where customers repeat themselves, re-explain context, or seek reassurance
- Increased effort required from the customer to move things forward — chasing, checking, compensating
The critical question is not where friction occurs once, but where it recurs.
Repeated friction is rarely accidental. It usually points to a systemic issue customers are navigating around: a handover, a boundary between teams, an assumption embedded in delivery, or a trade-off that favours internal convenience over customer effort.
Some customers will complain directly. Others will not — but they will talk. Experiences are shared informally through professional networks, peer conversations, and local or sector communities. In many markets, trust travels sideways long before it travels back to the supplier.
This is why friction cannot be treated as a private operational issue. Even when it does not surface as formal feedback, it shapes reputation quietly through lived experience.
3. Expectation Integrity (Revealed)
Where do customer expectations and lived delivery diverge?
Expectation integrity is not about what organisations promise. It is about what customers assume will happen — and whether reality consistently meets that assumption.
Most expectation gaps are not created by bold commitments. They form quietly, through patterns of behaviour, prior experience, and implicit signals. Customers build a mental model of “how this organisation works” long before anything goes wrong.
Expectation integrity is revealed when that model is tested.
Common signs include:
- Assumed response times that stretch without explanation
- Ownership that appears clear, then fragments mid-journey
- “That’s not how we do it” moments that surprise the customer late in the process
These gaps often surface first in behaviour, not complaints:
- Customers add contingency time
- They reduce reliance on commitments
- They hedge, seek alternatives, or run parallel options
In other words, customers adapt. That adaptation is the signal.
Expectation integrity is strongest when customers experience consistency — not rigidity, but reliability. When change is necessary, integrity is maintained through clarity, transparency, and pace. When change happens slowly, indirectly, or without explanation, integrity erodes even if outcomes eventually land.
Expectation gaps are not just communication failures. They are decision failures upstream, reflecting trade-offs between speed and certainty, efficiency and reassurance. When those trade-offs are not surfaced or owned, customers absorb the cost.
4. Sentiment and Advocacy (Declared)
What do customers explicitly say after the experience?
Sentiment and advocacy include:
- Net Promoter Score
- Complaints and formal feedback
- Referrals and testimonials
These signals matter. They provide context and confirmation. But they are lagging.
By the time sentiment is declared, customers have already formed a view, adapted their behaviour, and often shared their experience informally elsewhere. Sentiment explains how customers interpret the experience. It does not reveal how they navigated it in real time.
The insight lies in the gap.
When what customers say and what customers do diverge, the divergence itself is the signal. Behaviour shows where confidence is held or withheld. Voice explains how customers make sense of it.
Customer Spectacles do not dismiss sentiment. They right-size it.
Customer Spectacles require focus, not equality – CORE
Customer Spectacles apply across every segment of the market. What differs is not whether customers deserve clarity and fairness, but how proactively and intensively each relationship is stewarded.
Co-Creators – For strategic and high-value customers, the responsibility is proactive stewardship. These relationships carry disproportionate value and influence. Confidence, friction, and expectation integrity must be monitored continuously, not periodically. Failure here rarely stays contained.
Opportunities – For mid-market customers, the responsibility is enablement. These customers represent growth. The task is to make it easy for them to succeed, feel recognised, and progress without unnecessary friction.
Reliables – For lower-value, low-complexity customers, the responsibility is efficiency with dignity. Reliable service and clear expectations matter, but not bespoke attention that drains disproportionate resource.
Edge – Finally, there are low-value, high resource-drain relationships. Customer centricity does not justify carrying customers whose demands undermine delivery for others. Exiting these relationships clearly and respectfully is part of sustaining the wider system.
Customer centricity does not mean equal treatment.
It means appropriate stewardship. Check out our Account Based Growth Whitepaper
What changes when boards see differently
Boards that rely primarily on NPS tend to react late, over-generalise, or misread risk. Boards that adopt Customer Spectacles see earlier, decide with greater clarity, and make trade-offs explicitly rather than by accident.
They stop asking, “How are our customers doing?”
They start asking, “Which customers are experiencing what — and why does that matter?”
Customer success is not a score to be managed.
It is a reality to be governed.
And it starts by seeing customers as they experience you — not as a number on a page.