How well are you serving your customers? How likely are they to recommend you or interact with your business again? In this guide, we’ll share the best customer experience metrics to measure the success of your customer experience and how it improves or declines over time.
What are customer experience metrics?
Customer experience metrics (CX metrics) measure how enjoyable, frictionless and useful people find their customer experience with your business - from their first interaction and across the whole customer journey. These feedback metrics can be:
Quantitative - these CX metrics include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSat), Customer Effort Score (CES), website and social media data analytics. These measurements tend to be numerical or statistical and indicate areas that your customers are happy with and those that need attention.
Qualitative - these metrics are more about feelings and comments. They provide a more detailed view of why customers are happy or dissatisfied. Qualitative CX metrics include survey responses, sentiment analysis, social media posts and conversation recordings. You can keep your finger on the pulse of customer sentiment in real time with qualitative data.
Why tracking CX metrics is important
Your business needs customers for survival, so it’s important to listen to them and take the necessary action to ensure you have satisfied customers. Tracking and analyzing customer feedback and data will have a positive impact, namely:
Increase customer loyalty: keeping existing customers happy will lead to repeat purchases or business
Improve customer satisfaction: happy customers will market your business for you through word of mouth referrals and positive reviews and recommendations
Encourage customer empathy: internally, your teams will develop a more customer-centric approach with a better understanding of the target audience and how to help them.
Discover the 5 principles of good customer experience
The most important customer experience metrics:
Which CX metrics should you track? Here, we’ll explain what they all mean and how they can benefit your business.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Satisfied customers are a goal for businesses, so it’s important to track their happiness with their customer experience. A CSAT survey measurement tracks this by asking customers to respond to the question, ‘How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [product/service] you received?’ Customers are asked to rate their experience by choosing a number between 1 and 5, with 1 being very dissatisfied and 5 being very satisfied.
This method is a quick and easy user experience which encourages participation and it’s equally quick and easy to implement by your business. The CSAT score is calculated by taking the highest scores (4 and 5) to calculate a percentage. The target is 100% customer satisfaction - all respondents giving a CSAT score of 4 or 5.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the required effort level to do something such as make a purchase, find information or get support. CES surveys ask customers how easy a specific interaction felt.
Like CSAT, CES is usually rated on a scale of 1 to 5, from very difficult to very easy. You want customers to have a frictionless and effortless experience. Low CES scores provide actionable insights into areas that need to be improved.
Net Promoter Score® (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most popular CX metrics. It provides an indication of customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend your product or service to others. Make sure you gather this information far enough along the customer journey so that they have some experience to review.
NPS survey respondents give a rating between 0 and 10, from not at all likely to extremely likely. To work out your NPS score, you need to remove the neutral or passive responses (7 and 8 scores) and subtract the percentage of Detractors (0 to 6 ratings) from the percentage of Promoters (9 and 10 ratings). This score provides a benchmark to track customer experience ongoing. But to get more in-depth information to work with, an open ended follow up survey question (such as ‘why did you give that score?’) needs to be asked.
Customer churn and retention
What about the customers that stop using your business? The customer churn rate counts the lost customers within a certain period of time. For example, with an SaaS or subscription-based business, that would be those customers who cancel their monthly subscription, and e-commerce businesses would relate to a loss of customer engagement and purchases.
Another significant factor to track is the customer retention rate - those that you keep within a specific period of time. New customer acquisition is more expensive than retaining existing customers, so customer retention is an important measurement. Customer loyalty initiatives can be implemented to improve this rate.
Customer churn and retention
What about the customers that stop using your business? The customer churn rate counts the lost customers within a certain period of time. For example, with an SaaS or subscription-based business, that would be those customers who cancel their monthly subscription, and e-commerce businesses would relate to a loss of customer engagement and purchases.
Another significant factor to track is the customer retention rate - those that you keep within a specific period of time. New customer acquisition is more expensive than retaining existing customers, so customer retention is an important measurement. Customer loyalty initiatives can be implemented to improve this rate.
First Response Time (FRT)
This CX metric relates to customer success/ service. The First Response Time (FRT) looks at the average time it takes customer support teams to respond to a customer issue or request. To calculate your FRT, add up the total number of first response times and divide that by the number of customer issues received.
Armed with this information, you can benchmark optimum first response times and manage customer expectations. You can make improvements such as fixing pain points on the customer journey and adding helpful guidance on your website to reduce the number of support tickets raised by customers.
Average Resolution Time (ART)
It’s not just the first contact resolution (FCR) time that’s important to measure, as customer success issues can extend beyond that first touchpoint. The Average Resolution Time (ART) relates to the amount of time it takes for your customer support team to resolve a customer issue.
To work out the ART, add together the duration of all customer conversations and divide that total by the number of customer support tickets or conversations. A quick ART generally indicates a satisfied customer and a more positive customer experience.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV) relates to the average sum of money that a customer will spend with your business over time. Whilst this may sound more of a revenue value than a CX metric, loyal customers are more likely to spend repeatedly with you, so it’s important to have happy, satisfied customers to ensure a higher LTV. The aim is to get repeat business over the customer lifespan. View our Customer Lifetime Value Calculator for the steps to calculate CLV.
Should we measure all the metrics?
The simple answer is no.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by data overload and it becomes hard to see the wood for the trees. It’s a good idea to pick the key CX metrics for your business - which make the most business sense? Focus on the areas that matter to you, and listen to what your customers are saying about it. When you measure customer experience and analyze the most pertinent aspects for you business, you can make the changes and improvements that will make meaningful impact.
How to turn metrics into results
Once you’ve prioritized the CX metrics that are most important for your business, you can set customer experience KPIs. That can be motivating for your teams, encouraging them to work together to make the necessary improvements to achieve the customer experience targets. This isn’t a one-time, set and forget process. It’s important to measure customer experience and satisfaction regularly to see how your business is tracking and identify areas for improvement. With a regular process of tracking, analysing and implementing changes, you’ll see valuable results for your business.
How Customer Experience Management Software can help
Successful customer-centric businesses understand their customers and potential customers, know how to engage them wherever they are, and reduce churn by implementing effective onboarding customer experiences. How do they do that? By using CX metrics to analyse the customer journey and get real, measurable value out of that data.
Customer experience management software can help you to level up with your strategy, track the right CX metrics and ultimately improve your bottom line. It can transform your business by implementing an always-on customer listening approach to inform daily decision-making. Armed with customer experience metrics, you can prioritise the actions that will make the biggest impact to your business and to your existing, new and potential customers.
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