[PRACTICE NOTE] Bespoke: The Future of Experience Measurement
Organizations tend to measure what they can compare rather than what they can change. The instinct is a reasonable one, because a shared number settles arguments that would otherwise run on taste and seniority. Experience measurement inherited that instinct early, and most of the standard instruments still in use were built to travel well across companies and industries. The cost of that design choice surfaces later, when a leader asks a score to explain a specific failure inside a specific journey.
Bespoke is the claim worth defending. The future of experience measurement is company-specific and journey-specific rather than borrowed and benchmarked. That position appears in The Customer Excellence Enterprise as the ninth operational bold move, reimagining experience measurement. It has only sharpened since, because the work has moved into pharma, where the distance between a score and an action is widest.
Standard instruments were designed to be comparable
A score that means roughly the same thing in retail, in banking and in healthcare can be trended, benchmarked and defended in a boardroom. That portability is why the standard set spread so quickly, and it deserves respect rather than dismissal. Fred Reichheld's original case for Net Promoter Score in Harvard Business Review was an argument about growth, and for that purpose it largely holds. Bain reports that differences in the score explain anywhere from 10% to 70% of the variation in subsequent revenue growth.
That range rewards a moment of attention. It says the signal can be real, and it says a great deal else is moving at the same time. A measure built to be comparable across companies is, by construction, insensitive to the particular thing any one company is trying to change. Comparability and sensitivity pull against each other, and most measurement regimes never acknowledge the trade.
What a score reports and what it withholds
A relationship score tells a leader how a relationship feels in aggregate. It does not tell that leader where a journey stopped progressing, which is the only question an operator can act on tomorrow morning. Ask a frontline manager what a two point drop means for the shift she is about to run, and she will rarely know. The score was never built for her, so the failure is a design gap rather than a comprehension gap.
There is a further nuance that practitioners raise less often than they should. Likelihood to recommend measures the advocacy a company values, which makes the most widely held experience metric in the world fundamentally company-centric. Customers in the ordinary flow of their lives do not think in those terms. Measuring from the company's vantage point rather than the customer's is what drains an instrument of its capacity to move anyone to act, a problem examined further in the case of Net Promoter Score in pharma.
Reporting on a field experience metric designed for pharma field teams, CXM quoted a line I still use with clients. "Doctors don't go around asking about loyalty." The point concerned vantage rather than doctors, because what a customer is trying to do is the only honest basis for a measure. Measurement written in the customer's own terms tends to survive contact with the operating model, and measurement written in the company's terms tends not to.
Scores and journey measures belong in one frame
The position in the book was never that scores are worthless. Top-level experiential outcome metrics such as Net Promoter Score, customer success measures and company and journey-specific indicators are what equip leaders to reinforce the importance of customer value. Those measures belong linked to financial performance through objectives and key results, so that experience work and enterprise performance share one set of causal relationships. The real argument is narrower and harder than abolition.
A score without a journey-specific companion measure cannot be acted on. The companion measure is the intermediate layer, the granular driver that inflects the headline number and the business result sitting above it. Gartner's effort research shows how much lives in that layer. Low effort customers are 61% more likely to stay, and 62% of channel transitions are high effort, yet neither figure appears on a relationship dashboard.
What bespoke measurement means in practice
A bespoke regime starts from three decisions rather than from a metric catalogue. The first is which journeys the company actually competes on, because a company competing on access cannot be measured the same way as one competing on continuity. The second is which experiential factors it has chosen as its basis of competition. The third is where the thresholds sit, set per organization rather than inherited from an industry average.
Thresholds are the step most programs skip. A borrowed benchmark imports another company's operating reality, its customer mix and its cost structure, then quietly becomes the standard internal teams are judged against. Setting thresholds internally forces an organization to state what good looks like in its own terms and at its own cost. That statement is uncomfortable to write, which is usually a sign it is doing some work. The practical mechanics of this sit in the broader question of how to measure customer experience in pharma.
The Consumer-Grade Specification is a worked example
The most concrete instance of bespoke measurement in this practice is the Consumer-Grade Specification. It is a closed structural set of six conditions: Recognition, Anticipation, Coherence, Effort, Resolution and Visibility. Felt attributes such as easy, simple, fast and transparent are treated as reported outcomes rather than as design targets, because each of them decomposes into those six conditions. Thresholds are set per organization, which is what keeps a specification a specification rather than an aspiration.
The discipline of a closed set matters more than the elegance of any single condition. When a customer reports that something felt hard, the specification asks which condition failed, and the answer points at an owner and at an intervention. Recognition failures live in different systems from Resolution failures, and Visibility failures rarely sit where either of those do. A mood word cannot route work, where a structural condition can, which is the whole reason Consumer-Grade is written as a standard rather than as a sentiment.
Progression rather than sentiment
Sentiment tells an organization how it went. Progression tells it whether it went. That distinction is what makes a bespoke regime rigorous rather than merely local, because progression can be counted without asking anyone how they felt about it. Progression measurement also survives the two conditions that quietly degrade survey-led programs, which are falling response rates and the lag between a lived moment and a recalled one.
Progression is a stage in an operating loop rather than a reporting line. In the closed FieldOS loop that runs underneath field intelligence and activation work, Measure Progression sits fifth, after a signal is captured, a barrier is classified, an owner is assigned and an intervention is made. Learning follows it. In the commercial organizations where I have watched this work, measurement placed inside that sequence changes behavior, where measurement delivered as a quarterly readout largely does not.
In pharma the journeys are already named
Pharma states the case cleanly, because a commercial organization there does not control the transaction between its science and a patient. The journeys are the Path to Prescribe, the Path to Fulfill and the Path to Adhere, and progression along them is measurable on a stage ladder. The rungs are Scripts Written, Filled, Therapy Started, 90-Day and Persistence. Each rung is a count rather than a rating, which means it can be observed, owned and forecast.
Scientific value is realized when the patient accesses, starts, continues and benefits, not when the script is written. Written prescriptions are intent rather than realized value, and the distance between the two is where commercial value quietly goes. Dropout between rungs is largely experiential rather than clinical or promotional. A relationship score cannot see that drop at all, where the ladder can see little else.
Summary measures a finance organization can carry
Two summary measures sit above the ladder and make it legible to people who do not work in experience. The Realization Rate is realized value divided by earned value, and it states how much of what the science earned actually reached a patient. Customer Value at Risk is earned value multiplied by one minus that rate, which turns the shortfall into a figure a finance organization can carry into a planning conversation. Both are arithmetic over counted events, which is why they behave like operating measures rather than like sentiment.
The compounded version of that arithmetic deserves to be stated as an illustrative scenario rather than as a benchmark. A billion dollars of earned value becomes roughly seven hundred million after prescriptions that are never filled, less again after early discontinuation, and close to four hundred and fifty million in realized value after long term adherence erosion. No competitor takes the difference. That shape is what value leakage looks like when it is finally measured, and only a progression measure can see it.
A borrowed score cannot be forecast with any confidence, because no one can model next quarter's likelihood to recommend from first principles. A progression measure can be forecast, because it is assembled from counted events with observable conversion behavior between stages. That single property moves experience measurement out of the insight function and into the planning cycle. Forrester reports that customer obsessed organizations saw 41% faster revenue growth than the rest, and instruments are how that posture becomes operational.
Key Takeaways
- Standard experience instruments were designed for comparability across companies, which is precisely what makes them insensitive to the thing any one company is trying to change.
- A score reports how a relationship feels in aggregate, while an operator needs to know where a journey stopped progressing.
- Top-level outcome metrics still earn their place when they are linked to financial performance through objectives and key results and paired with journey-specific companion measures.
- Bespoke means journeys the company competes on, experiential factors it has chosen as its basis of competition, and thresholds set per organization.
- The Consumer-Grade Specification gives that idea a closed structural form through Recognition, Anticipation, Coherence, Effort, Resolution and Visibility.
- In pharma, progression on the three paths is countable on a stage ladder, which makes the Realization Rate and Customer Value at Risk forecastable in a way no borrowed score can be.
Diagnostic Questions to Consider
- Name the journeys your organization actually competes on, and state which measure sits on each one.
- Describe what a two point move in your headline experience score instructs a frontline manager to do differently tomorrow.
- Identify where your current thresholds came from, and say whether any of them were set inside your own operating reality.
- Locate the point in each journey where progression most often stops, and name the owner of that point.
- Explain how your experience measures enter the planning cycle rather than the quarterly insight readout.
Closing Reflection
The appeal of a borrowed measure is that it arrives already settled. Someone else did the construct work, the benchmark exists, and the number can be reported without an argument about what it means. I have come to treat that convenience as the signal to look harder, because a measure that cost an organization nothing to adopt tends to ask nothing of it either.
Bespoke measurement is more expensive at the front end and considerably cheaper afterwards. It requires an organization to say which journeys matter, which experiential conditions it will compete on and what good looks like at its own thresholds. Those three statements are strategy expressed as arithmetic, and once they exist the measurement regime largely designs itself.
For pharma the stakes make the choice less optional than it looks. A commercial system that sits inside the therapeutic value chain cannot govern value realization with an instrument built to compare companies rather than to track patients through a journey. Experience is the mechanism by which scientific value becomes patient and commercial impact, and a mechanism has to be measured where it works.
About the Author
Wayne Simmons is the founder of The Customer Excellence AGENCY and the author of The Customer Excellence Enterprise (Wiley, 2024). He is founding faculty of the MS in Customer Experience Management at Michigan State University's Broad College of Business. He led global customer excellence in Pfizer's first Chief Marketing Organization and in Bayer's Customer Powerhouse.
The Customer Excellence Agency: Advancing the Pursuit of Excellence in Service of Science.
