Customer satisfaction tools like CSAT and NPS have become must-haves in modern business. They offer consistent, scalable ways to track how customers feel about your brand. However, if you've been measuring CSAT and NPS for several quarters or years, you may begin to notice something surprising: despite continuous improvement efforts, your scores start to level off. So why do even strong-performing companies hit a ceiling?

CSAT and NPS Are Rear-View Mirrors

Both CSAT and NPS are structured to reflect how customers felt about a recent interaction or their general sentiment toward your brand. While these metrics provide helpful snapshots, they focus primarily on past experiences. They don't dig into *why* customers felt that way or what else might have influenced their perception.

As a result, you may receive a 9 out of 10 satisfaction rating – but lack insight into what drove that rating or what could make it a 10. Without understanding those internal drivers, it becomes harder to move the needle.

Customers Base Evaluations on Their Expectations

That's another common plateau factor: rising customer expectations. When your brand successfully resolves common pain points, customers begin to see that improved service as the new norm. They will no longer reward you with higher satisfaction – they're simply not disappointed.

This effect creates a satisfaction ceiling where improvements are expected, not celebrated, leaving you with flat scores despite real progress.

Surveys Often Miss Emotional and Contextual Drivers

Standard satisfaction surveys are limited by design. They tend to ask direct questions and offer defined answer ranges. This structure helps with analysis but can overlook:

• Emotional motivations behind choices
• Situational context (e.g., urgency, environment)
• Hidden frictions customers work around on their own

For instance, a customer might report satisfaction with a self-checkout experience while privately feeling overwhelmed by unclear signage. Surveys may not catch that nuance.

CSAT and NPS Show What Happened – Not What to Do Next

Ultimately, relying only on CSAT and NPS begins to hold businesses back when growth depends on innovation. These tools help you monitor satisfaction, but they don’t uncover what new features, services, messaging, or business strategies would lead to true delight or stronger loyalty.

That’s why leading brands are starting to pair traditional survey tools with exploratory frameworks like Jobs To Be Done – to move from merely understanding satisfaction to uncovering opportunity.

The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework shifts the focus from asking "How satisfied were you with this purchase?" to asking "What job were you trying to get done when you chose our product or service?" This simple shift creates a powerful lens for uncovering deeper customer insights that CSAT and NPS alone will likely never surface.

Why JTBD Offers Deeper Customer Understanding

At its core, JTBD is about understanding the human outcome a person wants – not just the product they use. Customers hire products and services to help them make progress in their lives. This includes functional goals (completing a task) as well as emotional ones (feeling secure, fitting in, being efficient).

For example, someone buying a lawn mower isn’t just buying blades on wheels. They’re hiring a solution to maintain a sense of pride in their home, meet neighborhood standards, or free up time for their weekend. These deeper motivations rarely surface through CSAT-style survey questions, yet they’re critical for identifying unmet needs and innovating with purpose.

3 Key Ways JTBD Fills the Gaps Left by CSAT/NPS

When CSAT and NPS scores flatten, applying JTBD can re-energize your customer understanding:

1. Uncovers the full decision landscape: JTBD explores why customers choose your solution over others – or opt for workarounds entirely. This helps reveal competitor blind spots and overlooked segments.
2. Identifies hidden friction points: Customers often tolerate imperfect solutions. JTBD interviews bring out pain points they're not consciously aware of – giving your team fresh areas to innovate around.
3. Connects to emotional drivers: Unlike most traditional feedback tools, JTBD surfaces feelings and social context that shape what 'satisfaction' really means to different audiences.

JTBD Helps You See the “Why” Behind Customer Behavior

While CSAT focuses on "what happened" – a service was fast, a product was acceptable – JTBD asks "why did you need this in the first place?" That difference turns feedback into opportunity.

As a practical example, if your NPS score has plateaued among a loyal customer group, you might use JTBD interviews to understand what these customers are truly trying to achieve with your product long-term. You may learn that while they’re satisfied today, they feel limited by certain constraints. That’s the kind of insight that sparks your next product feature or service upgrade.

JTBD Isn’t a Replacement – It’s a Complement

At SIVO Insights, we often recommend integrating JTBD thinking alongside your standard metrics, not replacing them entirely. NPS and CSAT provide the benchmarks – JTBD tells you what’s next. It’s a strategic way to reframe your customer satisfaction strategies for 2025 and beyond, through the lens of real people, real moments, and real unmet needs.

When customer satisfaction scores like CSAT and NPS plateau, it’s tempting to assume everything is running smoothly. But often, stagnating metrics are clues that there’s underlying friction in the customer journey – the kind that doesn’t show up in standard surveys.

Hidden friction refers to the moments when customers experience frustration, confusion, or unmet expectations that they may not articulate in direct feedback. Traditional tools, such as CSAT or NPS, often capture surface-level sentiment but miss the deeper reasons customers hesitate, abandon a process, or feel disappointed.

Common sources of hidden friction

• Onboarding complexity: Customers might technically complete setup or registration, but lingering questions or unclear directions can leave them feeling unsupported.
• Unmet emotional needs: The product may work fine functionally, yet leave the user feeling anxious, unempowered, or skeptical.
• Workarounds and hacks: If customers are creating their own solutions to use your service, it could indicate the existing process doesn’t align with their actual goals or needs.

The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework helps uncover these problem areas by focusing on the real job the customer is trying to accomplish – not just how they feel about the experience but what outcome they are aiming for and why.

How JTBD reveals friction points

Using JTBD interviews or ethnographic research, you can listen for patterns in the narrative. Ask questions like:

• “Tell me about the last time you used [product/service]. What led up to that?”
• “What did you expect to happen, and how did the experience differ?”
• “Were there any moments that made you stop, hesitate, or look for help?”

These insights expose frictions that may not directly affect CSAT or NPS but still influence consumer behavior and long-term loyalty.

By learning how to uncover hidden customer friction points through JTBD, you begin to unlock new pathways for enhancing the customer experience and fueling product and service improvements.

Once you’ve uncovered the deeper motivations, emotional drivers, and friction points behind customer behavior using the Jobs To Be Done approach, what comes next?

The real power of JTBD lies in turning those learnings into clear, purposeful action. It’s not just an insights exercise – it’s a tool for sparking focused innovation across your business.

Step 1: Reframe the problem

Traditional metrics like NPS or CSAT often lead to surface-level fixes (e.g., faster response times or smoother checkouts). With JTBD, you can reframe improvement opportunities based on the progress your customer is trying to make – their “job.”
For example, if a customer isn’t just “booking a flight” but is “trying to make business travel less disruptive for family life,” new innovation ideas emerge beyond airline seat options.

Step 2: Find opportunity spaces

Once you’ve mapped JTBD findings, look for areas where:

• Customers struggle to complete a step or workaround the system
• Emotional needs are unmet (like wanting to feel confident, in control, or cared for)
• Multiple products are being combined to complete a single job – indicating white space for bundling or simplification

JTBD insights help spotlight these gaps, guiding your innovation strategy toward solutions that truly matter.

Step 3: Prioritize ideas that serve the real job

Not all ideas carry equal weight. The most impactful ones are those that remove frictions or help customers make meaningful progress. Use JTBD research to validate which innovations will best support the job and how they align with customer behavior patterns.

The result? Innovation that’s driven by real human needs – not assumptions or trend-based guessing. This approach to actionable customer insights leads to more successful product development, better customer experiences, and long-term brand loyalty.

And importantly: JTBD doesn’t replace traditional market research or satisfaction surveys. It complements them by offering a strategic lens into consumer behavior where CSAT and NPS might stall.

CSAT and NPS are valuable tools – especially when you need to track sentiment or benchmark performance. But there comes a point when relying solely on these scores offers diminishing returns.

Here are some telltale signs that your business is ready to move beyond traditional satisfaction surveys and explore Jobs To Be Done and other advanced market research techniques:

1. Your CSAT or NPS scores have plateaued

If scores are consistently flat, it's likely you’ve optimized the basics. The next breakthroughs lie deeper – in identifying unmet emotional and functional needs that your current offerings don’t solve.

2. Customer feedback is vague or repetitive

Hearing the same high-level suggestions? Standard surveys often filter responses to vague categories like “make it easier” or “provide better service.” JTBD helps uncover the why behind those comments, offering more actionable direction.

3. You need new innovation pathways

If you're struggling to prioritize product features or uncover white space in the market, JTBD research offers structured ways to identify real demand – helping you shape your innovation strategy around what customers are actually trying to accomplish.

4. You suspect you’re missing emotional drivers

Traditional surveys often capture what customers do, but not how they feel. Understanding emotional progress is crucial for designing compelling experiences and building loyalty that lasts.

5. Your team wants deeper alignment with customer purpose

JTBD insights can help unify departments – from product to marketing – around the customer’s deeper goals. This clarity enhances messaging, design, sales tactics, and everything in between.

As customer expectations evolve in 2025 and beyond, organizations that rely solely on CSAT and NPS may struggle to stay competitive. Knowing when to supplement those tools with frameworks like JTBD is essential for uncovering unmet needs and driving sustainable growth.