How to get a world-class score
Getting a top score on The Customer Test isn’t about marketing language. It’s about what you show publicly — the specific signals that tell customers, investors, and employees that you take the relationship seriously. Here are the 10 things that matter most.
How a 10/10 breaks down
The principle
Every point must be earned through public evidence. It doesn’t matter what you say internally — it matters what a customer, investor, or journalist can find on your website, in your annual report, or in your earnings calls today.
Most companies fail on T2 and T3 — they use customer language, but don’t show the systems and proof behind it.
What does good look like?
Our research is all about highlighting companies that show public commitment to customer centricity. Of course, many companies may have world-class programs measuring and acting on customer feedback — but if they’re not showing it to the public, they miss the opportunity to prove it to customers and future clients.
Conversely, the companies that transparently show how they operate their program, and show evidence of this, are what we call “world-class”. We believe that B2B companies have the opportunity to have better customer experience by communicating about their programs to their customers, employees and investors. It’s an easy step for companies to take. Many have a functional customer listening program — now is the time to tell the world about it. The first step is taking some corporate courage and being transparent.
As far as we know, there are no guidelines or standard methodologies for presenting customer experience programs. This project — TheCustomerTest — is our first steps in codifying what “good looks like”.
Iron Mountain talk about their commitment to customers, and publish their Net Promoter Score of 56.9 directly on a public customer-facing page. A specific number, benchmarked against Bain & Company’s NPS bands, presented with pride.
ironmountain.com · open in new tab
J.P. Morgan clearly state “We focus on the customer” as principle #1, and use the Golden Rule: “Treat the customer the way you want to be treated and make sure you see everything from the customer’s eyes.” CEO Jamie Dimon talks about customers frequently in his shareholder letter — in contrast to many other CEOs who don’t mention their clients.
jpmorganchase.com · open in new tab
J.P. Morgan also go into detail on their NPS program and scores. It’s a little more hidden in their investor documents, but it’s clear they measure it: “~65 Net Promoter Score (NPS) in 2024 · Record High · ~5pt increase since 2019” — with per-product breakdown (>80 NPS Freedom Rise, >90 NPS Chase Pay in 4, >80% CSAT Credit Journey).
2025 Consumer & Community Banking Investor Day (PDF) · open in new tab
Leading Coca-Cola bottler Coca-Cola HBC show clearly their commitment to their B2B partners on their “About Us” web page: “We ensure that we listen and respond to every customer.” Full detail of their Net Promoter Program is given in their Annual Report — launched CustomerGauge across all markets in 2021, and the Net Promoter Score reached 65% in 2024.
coca-colahellenic.com · open in new tabHow public companies talk about NPS in their annual reports
Companion piece to our white paper Why customers don’t respond. After that paper’s publication we extended the analysis to roughly 3,000 NYSE- and NASDAQ-listed companies, asking a single question: which of them publish an actual Net Promoter score in a public document, and how do the strongest examples frame it?
Across the full audit, only 52 companies publish an actual NPS score or visible trend in a publicly accessible document — annual report, sustainability report, S-1, earnings release, or investor presentation. The rest mention the methodology in passing, talk about “customer satisfaction” without a number, or stay silent. The gap between intent and disclosure is wider than the industry talks about.
What the strongest disclosures share is that the score has been put somewhere it cannot easily retreat from — a filing, a target, a public commitment. That is the move that distinguishes a programme from a survey. The strongest examples we found, grouped by where the disclosure sits.
In the SEC-filed 10-K
The strongest possible context. The score sits inside the audited annual filing, having passed through both legal and investor-relations review.
In the S-1 / IPO prospectus
A distinct pattern: companies bake NPS into the prospectus to signal product-market fit at the moment of greatest scrutiny.
In earnings releases and investor materials, with movement
The disclosures that work hardest are those that show direction over time, not just a snapshot.
In sustainability and integrated reports
Where NPS is positioned alongside ESG metrics it inherits the same governance — board oversight, external audit pressure, and year-over-year disclosure expectation.
What the disclosures reveal
1. The number is paired with a target. UPS publishes “44, moving toward 50”. AvalonBay publishes “34, with a goal of 33 by 2025”. Coca-Cola HBC publishes “65%, up from 56%”. A score on its own is a measurement; a score paired with a target is a programme. The presence or absence of a target is the cleanest single test of programme maturity.
2. The number is paired with an operational KPI. Coca-Cola HBC pairs NPS with 99% of customer issues resolved within 48 hours. Shenandoah pairs it with churn near 1%. Rentokil pairs it with branch-level coverage. The pairing is what makes the number believable — it shows the score is connected to something a manager actually does, not generated by a survey nobody reads.
3. The number lives in a document the CEO has to defend. The 52 companies that publish a score have made it part of the formal investor narrative. Once it is there, the cost of letting the programme drift becomes career-relevant rather than departmental. This is the structural reason public disclosure outperforms internal dashboards: it changes who is paying attention.
Each of these patterns is, in different vocabulary, the same finding as the white paper. The clients who break the volume-versus-engagement trend are the ones whose customers expect the survey to matter. The public companies that publish a credible score are the ones whose investors expect the programme to deliver. Different audiences, identical mechanism: visible accountability is what converts opens into clicks, and what converts feedback into a number worth reporting.
Source: CustomerCentricityBenchmark audit database, May 2026. Approximately 3,000 NYSE- and NASDAQ-listed companies surveyed; 1,074 records with strong (Tier 3) customer-measurement evidence; 52 with an actual published score or trend. All quotations reproduce verbatim text from the public documents linked in the underlying audit.
10-point plan to improve your score
Ordered by impact. Each action maps to a specific scoring tier.
Gold standard: Coca-Cola HBC (10/10)
“We launched CustomerGauge, a new digitally enabled customer experience feedback approach, across all our markets in 2021. We initiated a faster and simpler way of listening to our customers more frequently, and we enhanced our ability to capture more data and actionable insights to drive revenue growth. In 2024, the Net Promoter Score® metric applied through CustomerGauge ‘voice of customer’ software reached 65%.”
This single paragraph earns points across all four tiers: customer language (T1), named programme with feedback mechanism (T2), published NPS score (T3), and named platform deployed globally (T4).
Even Apple scores 4/10
Apple — widely regarded as the gold standard for customer experience — scores only 4/10 on public evidence. They have customer language (T1) and some CX references (T2), but publish no NPS score (T3=0) and no governance signals (T4=0). This demonstrates that many companies run excellent CX programmes without making them publicly visible. The benchmark measures evidence, not reputation.
How does your company score?
Search the rankings to see your current grade, or read the methodology to understand each tier in detail.
Search rankings → Read methodology