Some KPIs, including NPS, are critical for contact centers to track, even if the tracking and measuring are not 100% accurate.
There’s a reason companies can’t quit Net Promoter Score (NPS).
“Would you recommend us?” is one simple question that generates a “sleek” number and gets reported to boards, tied to executive bonuses, and used as the measure of customer loyalty.
NPS is designed to measure customer loyalty and show whether the customer would continue to purchase from the business.
This KPI is easy to understand but the number is so simple that it hardly conveys any additional information about the call.
And it’s everywhere, especially in contact centers. Every interaction seems to hinge on NPS, as though that one number reflects the full spectrum of what happened in the call. But as many managers and agents will tell you, NPS often oversimplifies and hides deeper flaws. Imagine you are a customer taking part in the survey. You are in a good mood, rating high; you are frustrated (and not even because of the agent or the call), and you will rate lower. Here is another inconsistency. Businesses can have high NPS scores but high churn rates, which is a fundamental error because NPS is supposed to show loyalty.
While NPS is one of the major CX metrics, it is subjective and does not always reveal the true picture of contact center performance.
The Disconnect Between NPS and Contact Center Reality
If you’ve ever sat on the contact center frontline, you know customers rarely call because they are happy or just to say “thanks.” By the time they reach an agent, their experience has already been shaped by product issues, shipping delays, billing errors, or unclear policies.
NPS is not an open-ended question but a yes or no or 1 to 10 score that tells not much about the quality of the experience.
When the call is ended, whether customers are fully satisfied or still frustrated, they will rate the call with emotions. NPS ends up as a grade on the agent.
The issue is systemic: agents have minimal influence over these problems but take the blame anyway. Customer in a bad mood? Bad NPS rate. NPS doesn’t separate a poor process from a helpful agent; it just scores the interaction. And finally, through frustration, agents need to get higher scores ("Please give me a 9 or 10!") rather than focus on genuine problem-solving.
NPS could be more effective and informative if each rate was connected to the customer interaction data, but it is about tons of material and enormous resources to process.
Why NPS Data Lacks Context
We are not trying to disqualify NPS as a KPI but the obsession with NPS scores has created a culture of measurement without understanding. Agents get data points but lose the nuance of human interaction.
For example, a score of 6 will tell the manager that a customer wasn't satisfied. But it doesn't tell
Was the issue with the product or the service?
Did language barriers contribute to frustration?
What friction points drove the low score?
Without having the answers to these questions, organizations can make incorrect or not timely decisions. They might conclude that agents need more training when the real issue is more complex. They might blame attitude when the problem is the lack of comprehension.
NPS becomes a diagnostic tool without diagnostic capabilities—measuring symptoms while the root causes remain invisible.
The Real Cost of Misunderstanding
That disconnect has real-world business costs.
Like most contact center performance metrics, NPS captures only the outcome without digging into the reasons for the friction, which is basic comprehension.
When an agent can’t fully understand the caller because of a poor connection or they’re a non-native speaker hearing fast native speech, a single misunderstanding can add minutes to every call. Longer calls mean higher Average Handling Time (AHT), lower First Call Resolution (FCR), and more frustrated customers.
And it scales. Repeating information multiple times burns out agents and annoys customers. Even small cracks like this may affect NPS. But when analyzing scores, they won’t see what happened and will not definitely know how to fix it. This issue scales when you look at the issue holistically: over 10 million non-native-speaking agents in global contact centers are experiencing comprehension issues and silently driving down scores.
Traditional NPS and AI Tools
Today’s contact center AI stack is mostly retrospective. They respond to NPS pressure with sophisticated analytics: sentiment analysis, call transcriptions, keyword spotting, and post-call scoring. All these tools are perfect for telling you what went wrong during the call.
But they don’t help agents at the moment when understanding is most critical. They don’t even explain why the customer and agent had comprehension issues.
Without real-time tools to improve comprehension during the call, agents remain at a disadvantage, and NPS continues to reflect those struggles.
Language Barriers: The Most Overlooked Factor in NPS
We gave you hints about communication issues that affect NPS, but here is the explicit explanation.
Aren’t working hours about listening fatigue that occurs when they experience mental exhaustion due to sustained auditory effort? In simple words, in call centers, where agents spend 85–95% of their work hours listening to customers, fast speech accelerates fatigue.
Add customers’ emotions and frustration to fast speech and you get a massive comprehension gap.
Studies show that non-native listeners require up to 40% more cognitive effort to process fast speech compared to native listeners (Schmidtke et al., 2014).
After prolonged exposure to rapid speech, cognitive efficiency drops, leading to slower responses, increased customer frustration, and lower call resolution efficiency.
And all these are the most silent drivers of poor NPS.
Now let’s look at the geography of the global BPO contact centers: India, the Philippines, and Latin America. Despite the level of language proficiency, there is a constant comprehension gap when dealing with native customers of the US, UK, and Australia.
Fast-paced native speech can lead to misunderstanding, repetition, and delays, all before agents can even attempt to resolve the issue. The customer only hears the lag; they don’t see the language challenge. NPS drops, call times rise, and agent morale falls. NPS captures the frustration but not the cause.
These language-based friction points are mostly invisible to traditional KPI measurement systems unless there is a person who has experienced comprehension issues and is now a decision-maker.
Hecttor AI: Real-Time Speech Speed Adjustment
So we have NPS as one of the major KPIs that suffers from an “unknown” reason. Then we have the core problem revealed. The last component is the solution, a real-time solution for real-time problems.
Hecttor doesn’t analyze performance post-factum, and it doesn’t provide training for future communication. This voice AI technology works during the call, slowing down native speech in real-time with no latency, and helps agents understand every word without asking to repeat. We give agents the right to end the call successfully and have real scores.
The result isn’t just improved NPS scores but improved reality. Agents perform better because they're enabled to perform better. Customers feel heard because they actually are heard. The metrics improve because the underlying experience improves.
What Contact Centers Really Need
We don’t say NPS is useless and we don’t suggest discarding it. But we do need to stop weaponizing it. The metric has value when used appropriately. We are calling for a more nuanced approach to customer experience measurement, which also includes agent experience and recognizes the human factors behind the numbers.
A truly effective customer experience measurement system could be
Separate controllable from uncontrollable factors. An agent shouldn't be penalized for poor call quality or fast speech.
Provide tools that truly affect performance in real-time. If speech clarity is causing problems, solve it during the call, not after.
Measure effort alongside outcome. Customer Effort Score (CES) provides more actionable insights than NPS alone.
Create feedback loops that actually close. Instead of just reporting problems, make sure the problems are solved.
Conclusion: Fixing the Friction with Hecttor
Contact center performance metrics are complex. They gather enormous data, and they help build training and simulations but none of them will have an immediate real-time impact on the ongoing call.
Hecttor is not a magic wand to fix NPS and not a magic pill to give superpowers. We offer to fix the friction caused by language barriers and misunderstandings. We help call centers solve real problems in real-time, and you’ll see those scores rise naturally.