Customer experience (CX) is the impression that your brand makes on your customers through the customer’s buying journey. It affects how they perceive your business and, in turn, promotes loyalty, repeat purchases and a greater share of wallet. If you are behind increasing your revenue and market share via increasing customer loyalty, it’s important to know how to measure it, and what are the metrics you should be paying attention to.
Positive customer experiences encourage repeat business and referrals. We all know that keeping an existing customer is cheaper than looking for new ones, and that a happy customer will refer our business to others. Hence, it becomes important to gather feedback along the customer’s journey, and analyse the feedback to understand how you can make the experience better. As you embark on the journey, you will be gathering a lot of data, and while all data is important, some data is more important. In this blog, we talk about the important customer experience metrics, and what they tell you.
What are customer experience metrics?
Customer experience metrics (CX metrics) tell you how satisfied customers are with their interactions with your business, whether that satisfaction is influenced by the standard of service, the simplicity of transactions, or other factors. They aid in behavior prediction and success comparison with other businesses. CX metrics can be qualitative and quantitative, such as customer satisfaction surveys (e.g., customer interviews).
While all customer experience metrics have a common objective they each serve a different purpose. Some measure how likely customers are to recommend your product or service, others focus on specific aspects like measuring the time customer service needs to resolve an issue. You can collect CX metrics either internally or through third-party surveys.
Internal data could include time spent on the app or the website, purchases or bounce or drop off rates, purchase history, loyalty program memberships etc… While data collected by your customer experience management platform may include customer feedback, verbatim or engagement scores collected via surveys, SMSs, in-app questionnaires, emails or other post purchase feedback touchpoints and channels.
Is your head buzzing, and are you already envisaging how you are going to navigate massive spreadsheets? Well, let me make it a bit easier for you. Here are what I consider the most important key metrics, and my tips on how to derive valuable insights from them.
The most widely used customer experience metrics are:
- Net Promoters Score (NPS)
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
How to track customer experience metrics?
Before we delve deeper into the metrics, let’s talk about how you can track these CX metrics. You can either do it manually or you can use a CX management platform to automatically track and record the metrics.
Manual tracking involves logging on to different platforms, downloading reports and then compiling these reports into some cohesive insights, while CX management platforms are AI driven and free up a lot of your time to do the important stuff.
Customer Experience Metrics
1. Net promoter score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) analyses customer satisfaction and loyalty. On a scale from 0 to 10, you may ask customers how likely they are to suggest your product or service to others. Promoters (9 or 10 ratings), Passives (7 or 8 ratings), and detractors (6 or lower ratings) are the three groups of respondents. NPS assists in predicting brand health, income, and business growth for your business.
It is also important to understand the different types of NPS and when to deploy them, and the impact a good NPS system can have on your business.
2. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
Utilising CSAT, a critical performance metric, you can monitor customer satisfaction with your products and services. You must ask your customers how they would assess their overall satisfaction with the product or service in order to evaluate it.
CSAT provides information on how effectively you satisfy customer expectations, and satisfied customers are more likely to stick with your business. Monitoring CSAT is a great approach to increase loyalty and referrals leading to increased market share and revenue growth.
3. Customer effort score (CES)
A customer effort score helps in measuring the effort it took a customer to solve a particular problem, make a purchase, initiate a return or talk to customer care.
Customers are asked if working with your business was easy or challenging. You can identify problems that influence the consumer journey more easily thanks to CES.
In addition to these, other metrics that are important to track include:
- Customer retention rate (CRR)
- Customer conversion rate
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- First contact resolution (FCR)
- Customer health score (CHS)
You can read more about these metrics and the insights they provide here: What are the common CX Metrics
Should you measure all the metrics?
As tempting as it is to measure all metrics, not all of them might not be relevant for your business. So, before you start, I advise you to understand your business metrics (churn or retention and CLV) and the proper customer experience metrics in order to advance your business. Find the KPIs that really make sense for your business in practice. When a business chooses one customer experience metric and one associated behavioural measure, they often do well. Increasing complexity seldom results in added value. On the other hand, having a straightforward survey design and a straightforward set of aims and metrics to monitor enables the business to concentrate on what really matters: resolving problems and enhancing results.
What can you learn from customer experience metrics?
There is no “one size fits all” method for evaluating customer experience. It all depends on the type of business and the customer journey.
It’s important to pay attention to the metrics that matter the most to your business and utilise them as benchmarks for achievement. When analysing their customer experience, businesses need to be crystal clear about the metrics they are looking for.
For example, you could wish to check customer satisfaction levels or retention rates, or keep an eye on website click-through rates or conversion rates for particular campaigns or items within your loyalty programmes. Utilising CX metrics data may help you comprehend how your customers utilise your loyalty programme. Data from loyalty programmes may help you make the necessary modifications, change your products and services to better suit customer needs, increase customer loyalty, and improve customers’ overall purchasing experiences.
Customers’ opinions of a product or service can be properly reflected by metrics collected from surveys and focus groups. These measurements, however, should not be mistaken with real-time data that may be utilized to immediately spot trends in consumer behavior.
Summary
In this blog, we outlined the importance of gathering and evaluating customer experience data. Businesses may better understand their customers’ demands and make improvements to boost their income by tracking and examining each customer experience measure over time, and deliver personalised services that the customers are looking for.
If you would like to talk more about understanding these metrics and what they can do for your business, reach out to us.
