Yes, NPS was useful for a long time. It gave CX teams a seat at the table. But today, it’s mostly about chasing a score. That chase has become a distraction from what actually matters: business outcomes. When the metric fails to show real risk or opportunity, improving it becomes an exercise in vanity.
To move forward, teams need to leave the scorecard mindset behind and start connecting feedback to outcomes.
NPS: The Illusion of Insight
NPS is easy to measure and benchmark, which makes it appealing, but also limiting. When teams treat it as their primary signal, they fall into a loop: collect feedback, track the score, hope it improves.
But without understanding what’s behind the number, CX can’t drive action. Insights stay vague, issues go unnoticed, and teams defend scores instead of solving problems. Over time, CX loses credibility. If the metric doesn’t reflect reality, no one listens. The customer’s voice gets lost in the noise.
The Real Work: From Scorekeeping to Sensemaking
Understanding the customer now means grappling with unstructured, ambiguous, often conflicting input, at scale. It’s not just about collecting feedback. It’s about decoding what it really means, in context.
That means tying open-ended responses to what actually happened. Not just what they said, but when they said it, what they were doing, and what broke down.
But most CX teams don’t have the systems to do that. So they rely on manual reviews, keyword models, or siloed tagging exercises, none of which can capture the complexity of what customers are experiencing.
One hospitality group knew their bar spend was underperforming, but couldn’t pinpoint why. Using Tagado, they uncovered an issue with the bar staff that was affecting guest satisfaction. After implementing targeted training, they saw an immediate lift in bar spend and sentiment. The result: improved satisfaction, a natural rise in NPS, and an experience strong enough to support their acquisition strategy.
This isn’t just a tooling gap. It’s a functional one. As customer expectations rise, the role of CX is shifting from soft-skill service to cross-functional strategy. But that shift can’t happen if teams are stuck stitching together insights by hand.
What It Takes to Operationalize CX
To move from reactive to strategic, CX teams need more than dashboards. They need systems that can:
- Understand nuance, not just sentiment
“Great location, but staff seemed annoyed.” Is that a good review or a warning sign? Most CX tools flatten this into a sentiment score. Operational CX reads the tension, flags the root cause, and helps teams act on what matters. - Connect feedback to real-world events, fast
A spike in negative reviews isn’t helpful without context. But when you can trace it back to a booking glitch after a system update, you’re not just monitoring CX, you’re diagnosing it. - Track patterns and impact over time
Complaints about the bar vibe may seem minor, until they line up with a drop in spend and repeat visits. Operational CX links themes to metrics so issues aren’t just heard, they’re fixed. - Break silos and drive coordinated action
If operations, marketing, and frontline teams each see a different slice of feedback, no one sees the full picture. Operational CX gives everyone the same map, and a reason to move.
That’s what turns feedback from a spreadsheet into a strategic input.
How Tagado Turns Feedback into Action
Capturing feedback is easy. Making sense of it is not, especially not quickly, at scale, and with context. That’s where Tagado comes in. It pulls in data from every channel and uses generative AI and NLP to go beyond sentiment, interpreting what customers are really saying, even when it’s messy or unclear.
Take the case of a hotel chain receiving an uptick in complaints mentioning “football.” Without context, the term could mean anything. Tagado connected the dots: the hotel had adjusted its activity schedule around major football broadcasts, but hadn’t communicated those changes well. Guests weren’t upset about the football. They were frustrated by the confusion.
Tagado surfaced the pattern, flagged the issue, and gave the team the insight they needed to act. The feedback wasn’t lost in noise. It became a prompt for better communication, and a better guest experience.
This is what operational CX looks like: feedback tied to action, sentiment mapped to business events, and teams aligned around what matters. With Tagado, CX stops reacting to vague scores and starts preventing problems before they grow.
Stop Scoring. Start Leading.
The CX department isn’t just here to report on feedback—it’s here to act on it. To connect sentiment to business outcomes. To surface real problems and solve them before they grow.
Tagado makes that possible. It turns noise into signals. Feedback into action. CX into a strategic function.
Ready to evolve your CX team? Book a demo.
