Beyond NPS: Rethinking How Credit Unions Measure Member Experience

By Rebecca Secor, Chief Experience Officer, and Michelle Bloedorn, CEO – Member Loyalty Group

Yet for many credit unions, improvement in NPS has begun to level off. Scores remain strong, often in the top quartile compared to other financial institutions but pushing them even higher has become increasingly difficult. At the same time, leaders are recognizing that relying on a single measure may not provide the full picture of member experience.

So, is NPS still the right measure for your member experience program? The answer may not be to abandon it, but to build upon it.

The Plateau Problem: When High Scores Become Harder to Move

Credit unions consistently outperform banks in NPS, a reflection of their member-centric model. But those high scores also bring new challenges.

Because NPS is a broad, relationship-level measure, it can be volatile and difficult to interpret. A few percentage points up or down may not even be statistically significant, yet leadership and boards often view small dips as cause for concern. That volatility can create pressure to “chase the number” rather than focus on the experiences that actually drive it.

As one leader observed during a recent Member Loyalty Group Partner Forum discussion, “Boards see it as their job to push for higher scores, 80 this year, 84 next year, 88 after that. But at a certain point, you’re asking teams to move something that’s already near the ceiling.”

Moreover, NPS is a lagging indicator. It reflects accumulated perceptions over time, not necessarily the current state of your digital channels, branch interactions, or call center performance. Teams can make real operational improvements and see little movement in the score, at least in the short term.

Moving Beyond One Metric

The most effective approach isn’t to discard NPS but to build upon it by aligning experience goals with organizational strategy. Instead of treating NPS as the destination, use it as one of several guideposts that guide progress toward long-term objectives.

That means balancing leading and lagging indicators—the “now” and the “next.”

Leading Indicators	Lagging Indicators
Member effort scores (e.g., ease of digital lending)	Overall NPS
Digital task completion rates	Retention rates
Call volume by issue type	Complaint volume
Time to resolution for key issues	Churn or loyalty
Feedback by journey (loan, card, app)	Product growth, share of wallet

Leading indicators show what’s happening in the moment: how easy, helpful, and consistent experiences feel to members. Lagging indicators, such as NPS or retention, reflect the cumulative impact of those experiences over time but both matter.

Aligning Metrics to Strategy

Because every credit union’s strategy is unique, its member experience scorecard should be carefully tailored to align with its specific goals and priorities. For example, a credit union prioritizing digital innovation might focus on metrics like online task completion rates and digital satisfaction, while one emphasizing community engagement could measure member participation and feedback in local initiatives. This personalized approach ensures the scorecard is both relevant and actionable for each organization.

The key is to connect metrics directly to your major initiatives.

If your goal is to grow lending, track completion rates for digital applications or post-loan follow-up feedback. If your focus is on digital adoption, monitor task abandonment and digital journey satisfaction. If your priority is cost reduction, measure issue resolution and call reduction by type. And if deepening relationships is the aim, consider “feeling valued” and engagement measures by member segment.

When member experience metrics reflect the same goals that drive your business strategy, they become more actionable and far more meaningful to your teams.

Making Metrics Actionable Across the Organization

NPS can feel too distant from day-to-day operations. Employees in specialized or back-office roles may struggle to see how their work affects the score. Leading measures such as representative knowledge, response time, and ease of digital use help bridge that gap by showing what employees can directly influence.

That’s where experience attributes come in. Scores for knowledge, prompt service, and “feeling valued” are leading indicators that predict effort and satisfaction, which in turn influence NPS. Focusing on these drivers gives teams concrete ways to improve experience outcomes.

In practice, that might mean giving digital leaders ownership of metrics like online task completion, while contact center managers focus on issue resolution and first-contact success. Empowering departments with metrics they can move builds accountability and momentum and ultimately lifts the overall member experience.

Measuring What Matters Most

For credit unions that have been running NPS programs for years, the next step isn’t bigger surveys or more benchmarks, it’s smarter alignment. Use your experience data to guide the business, not just report on it.

When you combine leading and lagging indicators, you can better connect experience improvements to organizational performance and demonstrate impact in ways that resonate across the boardroom.

At the end of the day, what drives loyalty and growth isn’t a single score, it’s the consistency of experiences that make members feel known, valued, and confident in their credit union.