What are the best customer experience metrics and KPIs?

‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure’ is the quote our fellow Head of Marketing Quirijn lives by, and actually, so should you. Customer experience metrics (or KPIs) are measurements used to evaluate the satisfaction and overall experience of customers with a business or product. These metrics provide insights into the performance of a business and the quality of its products and services from the customer’s perspective. Basically, its answering the question if you’re doing a good job in the eyes of your customer.

In this post, we will evaluate the most popular customer experience metrics used by Customer Experience (CX) professionals.

Most popular customer experience metrics

There are two categories of customer experience metrics: those gathered via customer feedback surveys and those gathered via conversion and customer support solutions. Though the two can be used alongside one another to give CX specialists the full picture.

Let’s take a look.

CX Metrics gathered via Customer Feedback Surveys

One way to gather CX metrics is by employing a digital customer feedback tool. These solutions enable you to gather user insights into the customer experience, customer loyalty levels, overall satisfaction with the digital channels, online experiences and more. Let’s take a closer look at the top three most commonly used CX metrics gathered using customer feedback surveys.

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score is like the golden standard in CX metrics. This metric measures customer loyalty by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or service to others from a scale from 0 to 10. This type of metric is, therefore, used AFTER a transaction has taken place on your digital channel(s). Or at least, it should be. The NPS sometimes gets asked too early in the process, which will most likely destroy your NPS.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The CSAT is a rating of how satisfied a customer is with a specific interaction or experience with a business or product. Like a 5-star rating. With so many competitors in the market, it’s important to retain your customers and avoid churn. By knowing what your customers want and meeting these needs, you can increase their loyalty towards your brand and thereby attract many new customers in the same way. CSAT is used a little bit less than the NPS, but we see it more and more used on Mobile.

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The CES is a measurement we like a lot. In essence, CES measures the ease of an online experience. This is done by asking the customer directly how much effort it took to achieve their goal on your website. Like: ‘How easy was it for you to find what you were looking for?’. The reason we like this one, is that it tells you a lot about the experience. Always make sure that you follow this question up with an open comment field where the customer can explain why it’s rating the CES in a certain way.

CX Metrics gathered via Conversion, Customer Support and CRM Tools

In addition to metrics gathered via customer feedback surveys, there are also plenty of KPIs that can be extracted from solutions such as conversion tools, customer support tools and even the most basic CRM tools. Let’s take a closer look at these below.

4. Churn Rate

Everyones most hated metric, but so important for the future of your company! Churn rate is the measure of the percentage of customers who cancel or discontinue their use of your product or service in a given period. This metric is particularly useful for organisations that work with user subscriptions such as SaaS organisations. This number must remain low so that your organisation can compensate for its Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

By analysing your organisation’s churn, you can improve both your organisation’s customer service efforts as well as online customer experience.

Source: HubSpot

But wait… is churn a feedback thing?
Well… not really but also not not really. While this metric is not listed under customer feedback surveys, organisations can actually use feedback to gather more insights into why customers churn! These surveys are called ‘exit surveys’, which typically take the form of an email survey (i.e. following an ‘unsubscribe’ or cancellation) or in the moment on your digital channel (i.e. drop offs in the checkout funnel). This feedback can give you great insights in why customers decided to churn. Maybe you’re too expensive, maybe your product isn’t needed anymore, or maybe the UX is a bummer. This intell will give you actionable insights and might keep other customers on board!

5. Average Handle Time (AHT)

The Average Handle Time is a (more traditional) customer experience and customer service metric that measures the amount of time it takes for a customer service representative to handle a customer’s request or issue. With this metric, it’s important that hold times are minimised, talk times are optimised and customer satisfaction is improved.

Source: Zendesk

Looking to lower your AHT? There are also more digital-first ways of improving customer support. These are solutions like chat, or self-service online content that guides customers through their issue or a process. This lightens the load on your call centre, while also giving customers the freedom to find their solution without long wait times.

Do you do this already but you’re not sure if it’s up to par with the service received by actual call agents? Try leveraging digital customer feedback on your self-service pages (i.e. CSAT or star rating surveys embedded on the page). This is a great way to see if the information you provide is actually helpful and productive towards your goal to speed up the support process.

See? There’s really a CX metric for everything… even for CX itsself!

6. First Response Time (FRT)

Everyone hates calling a customer service number after a messed up order and having to wait for minutes that feel like hours listening to a low quality song that is pitched in a horrible way via the phone speaker (you know what we mean, we’ve all been there…). The First Response Time is the time it takes for a business to respond to a customer’s inquiry or request. The quicker, the better 😉 By tracking FRT over time, you can identify areas where their support team may be struggling, and take steps to improve response times and overall customer satisfaction.

It’s worth noting that FRT can vary depending on the channel used to contact support (e.g. email, phone, chat), as well as the complexity of the issue being addressed. In general, however, a lower FRT is generally viewed as a positive indicator of strong customer service and support.

7. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV, or CLTV)

This one is more alligned with the churn metric. The Customer Lifetime Value considers the revenue a business can expect from a single customer account throughout the predicted customer lifespan. CLV or CLTV, measures how valuable a customer is to your business, not just on a purchase-by-purchase basis but across the whole relationship.

By tracking changes in CLV for customers who have provided feedback, businesses can gain insights into how feedback is influencing customer loyalty and purchasing behaviour.

For example, if a business implements changes based on customer feedback and sees an increase in CLV for the customers who provided that feedback, it can be a good indicator that the changes were effective in improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Conversely, if the CLV for customers who provided feedback decreases, it may suggest that the changes implemented did not have the desired effect and may need to be revisited.

How do you choose which metrics to track?

This is a difficult question to answer as most of the time, this depends entirely on your organisation’s goals. For example, some organisations may be more focused on online customer loyalty and the reasons behind loyalty levels, whereas other organisations may just want the quick customer support performance-related CX metrics such as Average Handle Time (AHT) that can easily be reported to upper management.

But hey! Who’s to say you can’t track both feedback CX metrics and support CX metrics simultaneously. In fact, as you can see from the metrics above, a lot of times these metrics complement each other quite nicely. For example, perhaps your churn rate alerts you of something happening within the checkout funnel of your website. The churn rate is great for notifying you that there is some sort of issue taking place that is placing a negative impact on your CX, but what?

Customer feedback (and the additional qualitative data it provides) can give you those answers and more. With the rise and fall of metrics like NPS, CSAT and CES, you can deep dive further into your data and explore WHY certain scores are trending and therefore, better define what you and your team need to do to rectify the situation.

Analysing your CX feedback metrics

By monitoring and analysing these metrics, businesses can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to improve the overall customer experience. And the most important thing to do … keep measuring!