The Future of CX Metrics: Designing for Trust, Agency, and Relevance
- Erin Helcl
- Jun 19
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 20
A continuation of "The Future of Product and Service Design Is Now"
As AI accelerates product development, traditional CX metrics can’t keep up. What will define the winners isn’t just usability, it’s trust. This article explores what that looks like, how we might measure it, and why the next curve of CX maturity demands a new playbook.
Why We Need to Rethink CX Metrics
For years, customer experience (CX) metrics have served as vital signals: Are we meeting expectations? Are we making it easy to do business with us? Would customers recommend us?
But today, the experience landscape is shifting faster than our scorecards. As generative AI accelerates the pace of product development and saturates the market with new experiences, the question is no longer just "Are we delivering well?" but "Are we delivering what matters?"
CX maturity is not just about improving usability or reducing friction. It requires deep alignment between what the organization creates and what people value. Metrics need to evolve alongside this shift, the ones that got us here will not be enough to guide us forward.
A Quick Recap: CX Maturity and Metric Evolution
We've traditionally measured surface-level signals: effort scores, star ratings, and the Net Promoter Score (NPS). While NPS may still have a place, especially as a directional benchmark, we know it was never meant to carry the full weight of experience strategy.
As organizations mature, their metrics tend to evolve:
Emerging CX teams focus on pain points and reactive measurement.
Established CX organizations look at drivers of satisfaction and journey management.
Advanced CX leaders embed emotional, ethical, and trust-based metrics.
Innovative organizations co-create new measurement systems with customers, often using real-time data and AI to adapt on the fly.
Depending on your industry, maturity level, and regulatory context, the right metrics will look different. For instance, in financial services, market shifts influence perception regardless of experience quality. In healthcare, emotional safety is as important as access and efficiency.
The Evolution of CX Measurement
I see this shift happening across four stages of organizational maturity. Rather than a linear progression, think of these as different approaches that can coexist, with the most innovative organizations pioneering trust-based frameworks.
Visualizing the Shift: The Next Curve of CX Maturity
As we imagine the next decade of customer experience, what might an expanded view of CX maturity look like? This speculative model explores how traditional indicators might give way to deeper, more adaptive signals that reflect trust, resonance, and relevance.
You might imagine transitions from:
Surface-level signals (e.g., CSAT, NPS)
Functional signals (e.g., friction, task success)
Emotional & ethical signals (e.g., trust, coordination, agency)
Adaptive metrics (e.g., momentum, clarity, relevance in context)
Introducing the Trust-Based Framework
Here's what this next generation of CX measurement could look like:
A Moment with LumePath (a fictional product 2030)
Mateo, 45, sips coffee in his Halifax apartment while his 10-year-old son gets ready for school. On the wall display, a gentle prompt appears:
"A new Health Sector Facilitation course is open — aligned to your long-term goals, energy patterns, and caregiving schedule."
He glances up. The classes run Tuesday and Thursday mornings—times LumePath knows his son is at school and when Mateo tends to be most focused.
"Enroll?"
"Yes," he says.
In the background, LumePath handles the rest: registration, transit credits, syncing with his partner's schedule, and carving out time for onboarding. It even suggests the best time for him to meet his new peer group, when he's most likely to be present and energized, and works with the school scheduling system to assess the schedules of the peer group and draft a message for Mateo to share in the class communication channel.
For Mateo, it's more than a class. It's momentum toward stability, purpose, and the kind of future he wants his son to see.
Measuring Mateo's Customer Experience
This dashboard is a speculative example of what a future experience dashboard rooted in trust could look like, showing not only experience health but its direct correlation to business outcomes and opportunities to improve.
Scaling Trust: From Individual Profiles to Strategic Insights
While Mateo's dashboard shows trust metrics in action at the individual level, the real strategic value emerges when these insights aggregate across populations. LumePath's leadership doesn't just see Mateo's 86.1 trust score—they see that Atlantic Canada users in the "life transition" cohort (like Mateo) show 23% higher Active Referral Rates than other demographics, driving organic growth in underserved markets.
Population-level patterns reveal strategic opportunities:
Geographic clusters of high trust scores indicate successful market penetration
Demographic cohorts with declining Life Momentum Signals suggest product-market fit issues
System Coordination Scores across regions identify infrastructure investment priorities
Referral network analysis shows how trust grows through communities
This shifts the conversation from "How satisfied are our customers?" to "Where are we building sustainable trust, and how do we scale it?" The individual profiles become building blocks for enterprise strategy, regulatory compliance, and long-term competitive advantage.
For CX leaders and Service Designers building the future, this dual lens, individual trust profiles feeding strategic population insights, represents a fundamental shift toward measurement systems that drive both human outcomes and business growth. It's the kind of Trust Framework that Service Designers might need to design, govern, and evolve if AI-human hybrid services become more prevalent.
In Context: The Role of the Future Service Designer
In my previous article, I wrote that trust is the most valuable currency we have. As we design ecosystems where AI, humans, and systems work together, the question becomes: how do we measure and build that trust systematically?
The Service Designer role I outlined for 2030 includes "building and maintaining Trust Frameworks to make services transparent, explainable, and governed by dynamic consent." But what would those frameworks actually measure?
How would a Service Designer in 2030 know if they're succeeding at building trust in AI-human hybrid services?
This is where our traditional CX metrics fall short.
Your Turn: Challenge this Framework
This is intentionally big-picture thinking. The goal isn’t to be definitive — it’s to spark new conversations about how we measure what matters.
So let’s stress test it:
Where might this framework break down?
What industries or experiences would it overlook?
Which legacy metrics still earn their keep?
What would you measure instead?
The best strategic shifts happen when we debate the big questions together.
What’s your take on the next curve of CX maturity?
Note from the Author:This piece was created in partnership with AI, through a human-led process of research, writing, iteration, and imagination. I use AI as a thought partner — to challenge assumptions, accelerate synthesis, and visualize future possibilities. The strategy, insights, and direction are mine. The visuals were inspired by hand-drawn sketches and co-created with AI to bring the concepts to life.
That, to me, is the future of creative work.
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