The Hidden Reason CX Teams Are Being Cut in Automotive

The automotive industry is facing an ironic twist: even as companies preach customer-centricity, many are slashing customer experience (CX) teams. At first glance, executives blame cost pressures or underperforming staff. But the hidden culprit is something more fundamental – automotive CX metrics and measurement frameworks are failing.

In other words, it’s not a people problem; it’s a measurement problem. This post explores why traditional customer experience measurement in automotive (think post-sale surveys and NPS) is flawed, how it overlooks crucial pre-sale signals, and why a “100% signal capture” approach is emerging as the modern solution.

CX Teams on the Chopping Block – What’s Going Wrong?

Automotive brands have poured resources into CX programs in recent years, yet the results appear underwhelming. Studies show that despite “massive investments into martech, specialist teams and organizational overhauls,” customer experience scores remain flat. In fact, a CSBA analysis across 200 firms found the average CX score stuck at 49.9 out of 100 for seven years straight (CSBA has been benchmarking customer experience at 200 Australian firms for the last seven years). According to Capgemini research:  ‘Joining the race: Automotive’s drive to catch up with customer experience’, in automotive specifically, CX performance often ranks near the bottom among industries. This stagnant performance has executives asking: What are we getting for our CX spend?

The answer is often obscured by outdated metrics. Many leadership teams still rely on Net Promoter Score (NPS) or similar survey-based scores as the barometer of CX success. Unfortunately, NPS can paint a misleading picture. It’s a single number with broad categories and self-reported data, which is less reliable than objective analysis. Worse, when bonuses and targets are tied to NPS, organizations inevitably find ways to boost the metric without truly improving the experience. As Paul van Veenendaal, Managing Director, CSBA and an industry expert put it, companies are “gaming” NPS to achieve better but hollow CX benchmarks. For example, contact centers often get sky-high NPS by surveying only trivial interactions (like quick password resets) – giving a false sense of success. These superficial wins mask deeper problems in the customer journey.

Executives may not realize the severity of the measurement gap. A recent global survey by Capgemini revealed a huge perception gap in automotive NPS: industry executives estimated their NPS at 14, while customers scored them an average of 2 – the lowest of any consumer-facing sector. In short, leaders are flying blind with flawed data. When sales or loyalty don’t improve, they conclude the CX team failed, when in reality the metrics failed to capture what matters.

The Flaws in Post-Sale Surveys and NPS for Automotive CX

Most car dealer CX surveys and automaker feedback programs have a critical blind spot: they primarily collect input from customers after a sale or service. It’s become routine for dealers or OEMs to email a satisfaction survey once you’ve purchased a vehicle or had it serviced. But what about the prospects who had a poor experience and never bought the car? Those potential customers usually aren’t surveyed at all. If someone walks out of a showroom due to a pushy salesperson or abandons an online configurator out of frustration, the standard NPS survey will never hear from them.

This is a serious problem because those lost prospects are a huge piece of the puzzle. Dealership close rates hover around only 20–25% on average – meaning roughly three out of four potential car buyers walk away without buying. Many of them likely had subpar experiences (confusing websites, long wait times, indifferent staff) that influenced their decision. Yet these drop-offs remain invisible in traditional CX metrics. NPS is typically calculated only from buyers’ feedback, so it fails to capture the complete journey or the ones that got away. As a result, CX teams might be improving parts of the experience, but the metrics don’t reflect it because they’re “not capturing the complete cross-channel experience” or the pre-sale stage at all.

Post-sale surveys also suffer from low response rates and bias. Upset customers often vent publicly (e.g. online reviews) rather than filling out a company survey, and satisfied buyers might inflate ratings in the moment of new-car excitement. The data is skewed and shallow, focusing on those who responded instead of all customers. It’s no wonder Gartner predicted that by this year (2025) over 75% of organizations would abandon NPS as a sole metric. Relying on a single score like NPS “no longer cuts it” in today’s complex automotive journeys. Long sales cycles with many touchpoints demand more nuanced measurement.

Bottom line: traditional customer experience measurement in automotive is broken. It emphasizes post-transaction feedback and one-size-fits-all metrics, while “surveys often fail to capture the depth, immediacy, and drivers of customer sentiment”. This failure isn’t just academic – it has real business impact when CX teams can’t show their value.

The Hidden Drop-Offs: Why Ignoring Pre-Sale CX Loses Customers

Consider the typical car-buying journey. A shopper might research models online, interact with a dealer’s website or chat, visit the showroom for a test drive, and negotiate before purchasing. If at any point this journey becomes too painful – website errors, unresponsive staff, finance office hassles – the customer may give up or choose a competitor. Research shows one in three consumers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience, and over half would pay more for a better, hassle-free experience. In automotive, where purchasing a car is a high-stakes decision, a single friction point can be deal-breaking.

Now ask: where do those unhappy would-be customers show up in your reports? Likely nowhere. If a prospect never makes it to purchase, they don’t receive a survey asking about their experience. They become part of the “silent churn” – people who quietly defect due to poor CX. Executives see only the metrics from customers who completed sales, which might look decent, and they miss the iceberg of lost sales due to bad experiences. This is the measurement blind spot that’s prompting CX team cuts. Leaders think “CX isn’t moving the needle” because sales aren’t growing and NPS is static, but the truth is those teams have been focused on the wrong metrics and missing critical data.

It’s a classic case of “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” If no one is measuring website drop-off rates due to clunky design, or tracking how many shoppers leave the dealership after being left unattended, then the CX team can’t quantify their impact on those issues. They might be improving showroom hospitality or website navigation, but without capturing pre-sale signals, those wins don’t register on the NPS dashboard. Eventually, frustrated executives conclude CX efforts aren’t worth it and cut the team – when in fact the framework for customer experience measurement was setting them up to fail.

100% Signal Capture: A Modern Solution for Automotive CX Metrics

So how can automotive companies fix this measurement problem? The answer is to stop relying solely on partial, after-the-fact surveys and start listening to 100% of the customer signals across the entire journey. “100% signal capture” means leveraging technology and data to collect experience feedback from every channel and interaction, not just the sale. It’s about moving from periodic surveying to continuous, omnichannel listening.

In practical terms, this modern approach includes:

• Monitoring all touchpoints: Capture data from websites (click paths, drop-off pages, time on site), online chats, inquiry calls, test drive bookings, and social media interactions. Every interaction leaves clues about CX. For instance, if many users abandon an online finance application at a particular form field, that’s a signal of friction. If dealership call transcripts show repeated complaints about long wait times, that’s valuable feedback without waiting for a survey.

• Real-time feedback and “always-on” listening: Instead of waiting weeks after a sale to hear from customers, brands can use real-time prompts and social listening. Think of the star rating prompt right after a live chat, or tracking Twitter and Facebook mentions of the dealership to catch issues as they happen. Companies are shifting from episodic surveys to “always-on” listening across channels, so they can address problems before they escalate. In other industries, for example, telecom providers monitor spikes in social complaints to fix service issues before NPS plummets. Automotive can do the same for CX issues (e.g. a trend of negative tweets about a local dealer).

• Analyzing unstructured data with AI: Advances in AI, especially speech and text analytics, now allow companies to analyze 100% of customer interactions at scale. One financial institution found that by using AI to analyze every single customer call, they achieved “100% coverage” of interactions and uncovered issues that random sample surveys had missed. They went from insights based on ~50 surveys a week to insights from thousands of calls per day. For automotive, similar conversation intelligence can transcribe and evaluate every dealership phone call or chat, detecting sentiment and pain points automatically. Instead of a few dozen survey responses, you suddenly have thousands of data points showing where customers are delighted or frustrated in the journey.

• Combining direct and indirect feedback: Modern CX platforms (sometimes called Voice of the Customer platforms) merge survey data with operational and behavioral data. Surveys alone can’t keep up, so Onlive's platform captures “experience signals as they happen – across every channel, from direct feedback to indirect clues like chat logs, social reviews, CRM data and even observed digital behavior”. This holistic picture means no customer signal is ignored. If 10 out of 100 shoppers complain about lack of EV options via social media, and 30 more quietly click away from your EV page online, a 100% capture approach will register both the explicit complaints and the implicit behavior.

By embracing 100% signal capture, automotive CX teams can finally measure what matters. They can identify the root causes of pre-sale drop-offs (e.g. confusing pricing info or aggressive sales tactics) and present hard data to executives on how those issues affect revenue. Importantly, they can also demonstrate the impact of their improvements. For example, if CX initiatives reduce the website abandonment rate or improve test-drive scheduling ease, the new metrics will show a lift in conversion, not just a bump in post-sale survey scores.

From Lagging Score to Leading Insights (and Saving Your CX Team)

To avoid misguided CX layoffs, automotive executives must change what they measure. It’s time to evolve beyond a singular reliance on NPS or the occasional dealer CSI survey. The future of automotive CX metrics is a balanced scorecard that captures all stages of the journey and ties experience to outcomes. This includes new metrics and methods such as customer effort scores (how easy was the process?), journey completion rates, sentiment analysis, and first contact resolution, alongside traditional satisfaction ratings. In fact, some organizations are adopting composite indices (like an Experience Quality Index) that aggregate multiple data sources for a 360° view of CX.

Crucially, these modern metrics must be aligned to business results. Instead of obsessing over one number like NPS, ask how experience improvements are reducing drop-offs or increasing loyalty. The shift is already underway in leading companies. Gartner’s prediction of NPS’s decline is proving true as more businesses integrate qualitative signals and real-time analytics into their dashboards. Those that don’t adapt risk repeating the cycle of “unknown issues → poor results → CX team gets blamed.”

Executives should see CX teams not as cost centers to cut, but as navigation teams guiding you with better instruments. If the instruments (metrics) are upgraded, the team can chart a course to genuine improvements in customer satisfaction and sales. The automotive industry has an enormous opportunity here: brands that fully understand and optimize their customer experience will capture the buyers that competitors are unknowingly repelling.

In summary, current automotive CX frameworks fail because they measure too little, too late. Post-sale surveys and NPS miss the early warning signs – the stalled web shopper, the disgruntled lot visitor – that indicate something’s broken in the experience. The hidden reason CX teams are being cut is that these failures make it seem like CX efforts aren’t working. The fix is to measure CX the modern way: capture 100% of signals, across 100% of the journey. When you do, you get a true picture of customer experience, and you equip your CX team to demonstrably drive growth rather than be a cost to cut.

Ready to rethink your automotive CX metrics? Don’t let outdated measurements undermine your customer experience strategy. Talk to us today and discover practical, next-generation ways to gauge CX success and keep your team off the chopping block.