How to Benchmark Your Customer Experience Against Competitors

An NPS of 35 sounds decent in isolation, but is it good? The answer depends entirely on what your competitors and industry peers are scoring — internal trend tracking alone can't answer that.

Use Published Industry Benchmarks

Industry associations, research firms, and customer experience consultancies publish annual NPS and CSAT benchmarks by sector. These give you a rough sense of where "good" and "excellent" sit for your specific industry, which varies enormously (SaaS benchmarks differ dramatically from telecom benchmarks, for example).

Mine Public Reviews of Competitors

Competitor reviews on G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and app stores are a free, if unstructured, benchmark of customer sentiment. Look for recurring themes in competitor complaints — they often reveal gaps you can position against directly.

Run Comparative Win/Loss Surveys

For B2B companies, surveying prospects who chose a competitor over you (and vice versa) provides direct, if smaller-sample, competitive insight that generic benchmarks can't match. Ask specifically what tipped the decision.

Watch Trend Direction, Not Just Absolute Position

A competitor with a higher current NPS but a declining trend is a less durable threat than one with a lower but rapidly rising NPS. Track competitive sentiment trends over time where public data allows (App Store ratings over time, review volume trends).

Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Benchmarks

A numeric benchmark tells you whether you're ahead or behind; competitor review text tells you why. Read a sample of your closest competitor's recent negative reviews alongside your own — the specific language customers use to describe frustrations often reveals positioning opportunities that a bare numeric comparison would never surface.

Setting Realistic Improvement Targets

Once you understand your competitive position, set improvement targets grounded in that context rather than an arbitrary internal goal. Closing a 15-point NPS gap with the market leader in a single quarter is unrealistic; closing it by 3-5 points per quarter over a year, tracked and reported consistently, is both achievable and genuinely meaningful progress worth communicating to stakeholders.

Competitive benchmarking turns "how are we doing" into "how are we doing relative to the alternatives our customers are actually considering" — a much more actionable frame for strategic decisions.