The 6 Pillars of Customer Experience: What Drives Loyalty and NPS

What are the six pillars of customer experience, and how much does each one matter?

The six pillars of customer experience are Integrity, Personalization, Expectations, Time & Effort, Resolution and Empathy. They come from KPMG's Global Customer Experience Excellence (CEE) 2025-2026 report, which weighs each pillar by how strongly it drives NPS and loyalty. The weights rest on 80,594 consumer interviews covering 2,684 brands in 16 countries. Integrity is the strongest NPS driver at 19.0%. Personalization is the strongest loyalty driver at 20.3%.

Source: KPMG Global Customer Experience Excellence 2025-2026. The weights add up to 100% in each column, so the changes are percentage points versus KPMG's 2024 edition.

Why do the weights matter less than the headline suggests?

Most summaries of this report lead with the same sentence: Integrity and Personalization together carry 38.5% of the weight in the loyalty model. That is true. It also means the other four pillars carry 61.5%.

The spread is narrow. Between the strongest and weakest NPS driver there are 4.0 points (19.0% against 15.0%). For loyalty there are 6.7 points (20.3% against 13.6%). If all six pillars were equal, each would carry 16.7%. These are SurveyGauge's own calculations from KPMG's table.

Read that way, the table says something less comfortable than "focus on two pillars". It says an experience fails when any one pillar breaks, and an average weight cannot tell you which one is breaking at your customers. Time & Effort shows it well. It is the third-strongest loyalty driver at 16.9%, ahead of Expectations, Resolution and Empathy, yet it rarely makes it onto a B2B priority list.

Integrity: trust is the strongest NPS driver

Integrity is about honesty, transparency and fair treatment. In practice it means clear pricing and terms, promises that are kept, fair treatment when something goes wrong, and ownership of mistakes instead of explanations. KPMG notes that Integrity's weight decreased in some markets this year, and says it will keep watching it closely.

In B2B the price of an Integrity lapse is usually a renewal rather than a single purchase. That is our reading, not KPMG's. It is also why invoicing surprises and unannounced scope changes show up so often in detractor comments. If you want to see how those comments are worked into a recovery plan, read our detractor recovery playbook.

Personalization: harder when the buyer is a group

Using a customer's name in an email is not personalization. That is automation. Real personalization means showing that you understand a customer's specific situation and adapting to it: a unified customer view, analysis that identifies individual needs, and action based on context rather than reaction.

In B2B the customer is rarely one person. Gartner reports buying groups of five to 16 people across up to four functions (press release 7 May 2025, survey of 632 B2B buyers in August and September 2024). Forrester reports that on average 13 people in an organisation are involved in the buying decision (press release 4 December 2024). Both numbers describe the purchase, not the relationship after signature. Our inference is that the customer side stays a group after the contract is signed.

Gartner's data points to a sharp edge in that. In the same release, Gartner reports that content tailored to the buying group as a whole lifts consensus by 20%, while tailoring to individual stakeholders is associated with a 59% negative impact on consensus. That is a sales-stage finding, so do not read it as a CX weight. It does suggest a rule for the Personalization pillar: personalise to the account, not only to your favourite contact. How that works in practice is described in account-based CX.

Expectations, Time & Effort and Resolution: what moved

Expectations has the largest rise of any pillar in KPMG's 2025-2026 data: +0.4 points as an NPS driver and +0.3 as a loyalty driver. The distance to Integrity is 2.1 points on NPS and 1.9 on loyalty (our calculation). Companies that handle this pillar well set expectations at the start, tell customers early about changes and delays, and behave the same way across channels.

Time & Effort moved the other way as an NPS driver (-0.3) and up as a loyalty driver (+0.1). The pillar also applies to your own feedback programme. If the survey is heavy for customers or the follow-up needs manual work internally, you weaken the pillar you are trying to measure. A short, specific survey protects it.

Resolution is steady (-0.2 on NPS, unchanged on loyalty). KPMG does not claim that good resolution turns detractors into promoters. Our own experience is that it often does, when the follow-up is fast and comes from someone with the mandate to fix the problem. That is a discipline, not a courtesy gesture, and closing the loop is how you build it.

Empathy: the lowest weight, and the one AI exposes

Empathy carries the lowest weight in both columns (15.0% for NPS, 13.6% for loyalty), but its loyalty weight rose by 0.2 points. KPMG says it will monitor the importance of Integrity and Empathy closely as AI takes on more of the customer dialogue.

Our reading is that AI takes over routine interactions, which makes the human contacts that remain weigh more. An AI answer without empathy is a faster form letter, and customers notice. A low average weight is not a reason to skip the pillar, only a reason to put the effort where the human contact still happens, which in long B2B relationships is also where retention is won or lost.

KPMG measured consumers. What changes in B2B?

KPMG's weights come from consumer interviews. A B2B programme has fewer accounts, longer relationships, contracts where one lapse can cost a renewal, and several people on the customer side. Those differences can move the weights, and nobody knows by how much until it is measured.

That is why we treat the table as a hypothesis. The test is a key driver analysis on your own data: relate pillar-level scores to NPS and, where you can, to renewals and expansion. The pillar worth fixing first is the one where your accounts score lowest relative to how much it matters for them, not the one with the highest global weight. If you only measure the score, NPS alone will tell you that something is wrong but not what.

What this looks like in practice: Nordika A/S

Nordika A/S is a hypothetical company with 120 B2B accounts. The numbers below are invented to illustrate the method and are not client data.

Nordika's NPS falls from 34 to 27 over two quarters. The management team assumes Personalization, because it has the highest global weight. A review of 40 detractor comments, coded by pillar, tells a different story: 17 are about invoices and price surprises (Integrity), 9 about slow replies (Time & Effort), 6 about missed commitments (Expectations), and 8 are spread across the rest. Nordika fixes invoice transparency first and sets a reply-time target second. Personalization waits, even though it carries the higher average weight.

A good customer experience is the one that fits your accounts, not the average consumer.

Sector scores: where does your industry stand?

Source: KPMG Global Customer Experience Excellence 2025-2026. The scores compare sectors with each other and are based on consumer ratings, so they say little about where a B2B company in the sector stands. Banking ranks fourth at 7.52. See CX in financial services for the sector view. For NPS by industry, see NPS benchmarks 2026.

Total Experience: the next evolution

KPMG introduces Total Experience as the overarching framework: the integration of customer, employee, partner and digital touchpoints into one coherent whole. It rests on five principles: customer centricity, data-driven insights, seamless integration, employee empowerment and technology enablement.

The fourth principle is where the customer and employee sides meet. eNPS sets a ceiling on customer experience, because a disengaged team cannot deliver on any of the six pillars for long. For a step-by-step way to turn the report into decisions, see our guide on using CX benchmark data in your strategy.

What does this mean for your CX strategy?

Measure the pillars, not only NPS

A five-point drop in NPS can come from a trust problem (Integrity) or a friction problem (Time & Effort). The fix is different in each case. Add pillar-level questions or code the comments by pillar.

Find your weakest pillar before you choose a priority

Compare your pillar scores with each other and with renewal outcomes. Use the global weights as a starting hypothesis, not as the answer.

Personalise to the account

Reach the whole group on the customer side, not just the contact you know best.

Keep your own programme light

Your feedback process should score well on Time & Effort. Automate the administration and spend your time on action.

Close the loop on every dissatisfied customer

Resolution requires systematic follow-up. Design the process so that every detractor is contacted and every pattern leads to a concrete fix.

How SurveyGauge helps

SurveyGauge combines Platform, Administration and Advisory in one subscription. The administration layer keeps your own programme light (Time & Effort), automated close-the-loop flows make sure no dissatisfied customer goes unnoticed (Resolution), and our advisors help you read the result for your accounts instead of the average consumer.

Sources: KPMG Global Customer Experience Excellence 2025-2026, "Total Experience: Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI". Gartner press release, 7 May 2025 (632 B2B buyers, August-September 2024). Forrester press release on The State of Business Buying, 4 December 2024.