Consumer intelligence dashboard - data sources like surveys and customer support, compared with social media feedback will reveal sentiment towards your brand.

73% of consumers say that a good customer experience influences their brand loyalties. So much so that the more expensive a product is, the more they’re willing to pay. “While every industry sees a potential price bump for providing a positive customer experience, luxury and indulgence purchases benefit the most from top-flight service."

Customer-centric brands put the consumer at the core of their business. The positive CX they provide, builds strong, long-term relationships with customers.

“Today’s consumers expect brands to meet them where they are, with empathy, and a shared set of values. Conversational Intelligence is the key to unlocking meaningful customer relationships by understanding what customers are saying, where they are saying it and why.”
Cara Buscaglia | Chief Innovation & Insights Officer @ Talkwalker
State of Conversation 2021 Report

Journey to 360° customer-centricity.
A positive customer experience drives revenue, increases retention, reduces costs.

Customer experience measurement

87% of customers who said they had a good experience with a brand will buy again, compared to 18% who suffered a poor customer experience.

If that doesn’t inspire you to improve your customer experience, I don’t know what to say.

Maintaining a good customer experience to improve loyalty and advocacy - being customer-centric - is a full time job. How do you know if it’s working? If your customers are happy with the experience?

Measuring the results of your CX efforts can be a challenge. You can ask if you’ve satisfied your customers, sure. But, were there glitches in the buying journey? Could things have been easier? Would they buy your brand again?

Customer experience metrics occur at every touch point of the customer journey. From the second they land on your website or receive a cold call, to payment and delivery.

This post will walk you through customer experience measurement. What they are, CX measurement, CX business KPIs, and the 19 best CX metrics for measuring customer experience...

What is customer experience measurement?

CX measurement is the process of measuring the customer experience throughout the customer journey. Every touch point. Every customer action.

Why is measuring customer experience important?

Becoming a customer-centric brand is a huge task in itself. An essential task if you want a profitable company. Measuring CX helps you understand the needs, wants, and frustrations of your customers, so you can put them at the heart of your business and meet their demands.

Consumer behavior constantly changes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were major shifts as we moved online for work, rest, and play. With brands rapidly adapting to this new behavior, collecting and analyzing customer experience metrics takes on a new importance, enabling businesses to understand what’s keeping customers satisfied, and what’s causing displeasure. These insights help you better meet consumer expectations and continuously improve your customer experience.

Check out my guide, Consumer behavior in marketing, to learn more about consumer behavior analysis.

What are customer experience metrics?

Customer experience metrics are the KPIs that your brand should measure so that you understand how customers are interacting with your business, at every point in their journey. CX metrics help you understand the level of loyalty and satisfaction your customers have towards your brand.

Metrics can include Net Promoter Score® to track customer loyalty, customer effort score to see if they’re struggling to get the support they need, churn to see how many and why customers are abandoning your brand, customer satisfaction, and more.

You’ll find the list of 19 customer experience metrics later in this post...

Simulated consumer intelligence dashboard - Net Promoter Score® show spikes shadowing online mentions around the brand.

Each CX metric has its own purpose and benefit, so I’d suggest using several for actionable results.

What are customer experience business KPIs?

Listening to the voice of the customer is essential if you’re looking to become a customer-centric brand, with a winning customer experience. The CX metrics you choose to measure have to relate to your business operations, so you can find the link between a customer action and their whereabouts in the buying journey. This means that you’ll learn where in the journey you need to make improvements.

Your KPIs - for online and offline businesses - can include ease of purchase, payment methods, speed of service, delivery time, queue time, customer support, returns, etc., anything that involves your customers and their experience with your brand.

There are a ton of CX metrics. I’m not suggesting you use them all, only those that relate to your business. I’d recommend a handful for most brands. Net Promoter Score® is quick, easy, and almost 100% accurate. Customer churn rate and retention are biggies for business development. Customer behavior metrics - dwell time, purchase type - will help you adapt your strategy to meet consumer needs.

Enough. Let’s check out the customer experience metrics...

19 customer experience metrics

Measuring and analyzing your CX efforts proves whether your customer journey is successful. Highlighting areas where improvements to your strategy are needed. Here are the 19 best customer experience metrics to monitor for your business, so you can have a comprehensive view of your customer experience strategy...

Net Promoter Score® - NPS

Why is NPS the most commonly used customer experience metric?

It’s easy to perform. It’s easy to track.

NPS shows the percentage of customers who’d be happy to recommend your brand. So simple, all you have to do is ask customers, “How likely are you to recommend our brand to friends and colleagues?” on a scale of one to 10. Zero being unlikely to recommend, and 10 being very likely. You can then categorize based on a predefined criteria…

• Promoters - 9 to 10
  Customers who love your brand big time, and will recommend it. They're loyal and will make further purchases. On social media, they'll share valuable user-generated content. Use it.
  
  
• Passives - 7 to 8
  Customers who are content with your brand, but will avoid recommending or criticizing. Their loyalty isn't as strong, and if they find a better product, they're likely to leave.
  
  
• Detractors - 0 to 6
  Customers that don't like your brand and will share bad reviews, negative social media comments, etc. Definitely won't recommend, and could cause damage to your brand's reputation.

Net Promoter Score®
“How likely are you to recommend our brand to friends and colleagues?”

If you’d like to know more about NPS and how to improve your score, check out Dan’s post Why your Net Promoter Score® needs integrated customer data.

Customer satisfaction - CSAT

CSAT, along with Net Promoter Score®, is one of the most important customer experience metrics, because it measures how happy your customers are with a specific interaction - following a customer support call, returning a product, etc.

Usually on a scale from one to five, customers are asked in a CSAT survey how satisfied they are. Very satisfied or not satisfied.

A great example of how to collect CSAT data is Amazon’s rating system...

Amazon’s customer satisfaction online form.

Often used after a customer support ticket has been closed, CSAT can be adapted to suit your business needs...

G2 - formerly G2 Crowd - customer satisfaction reviews.

Referral rate

While Net Promoter Score® tracks customer loyalty and how happy they are to recommend your brand, referral rate measures whether they recommend or not.

You can use a referral program which assigns a unique link for each customer, or an enterprise-level social listening platform developed to find and analyze consumer intelligence.

Use social listening to find all recommendations of your brand online.

Customer engagement

Some customers load up their trolley, click pay, and they’re gone. Others engage with brands. The customer engagement metric identifies how engaged a customer is by measuring their behavior with a brand. How often they communicate with your brand. Like, share, comment on social media and blog posts. How long they spend on your website, how many pages they visit, or download content.

Customer acquisition

Customer acquisition measures how much it costs your business to get a new customer. This would include sales, marketing, PR, paid ads, customer experience, data and analysis.

A good customer acquisition strategy keeps the costs down, while still winning customers. If your brand offers a good customer experience, gets clients via referrals and word-of-mouth, and has a top dollar reputation, it’s going to save you having to spend a fortune on customer acquisition.

Customer loyalty

If you’re looking for brand advocates - consumers happy to promote your brand - loyal customers are the most powerful.

“66% of consumers trust customer reviews 12x more than brand content.” How to get the most out of user-generated content

You asked we listened. Introducing our new Oat dairy alternative (yes, it's vegan). Try it in your latte today. pic.twitter.com/B4r6FUdK5i

— Starbucks UK (@StarbucksUK) January 4, 2018

To track this CX metric, you need to analyze how often customers come back to your business and make regular purchases, rather than going to one of your competitors. Loyal customers will come back again, and again, and again.

Can’t talk rn, too busy planning my entire day tomorrow around going to Starbucks and trying their new oatmilk drink

— Hannah (@benzenehan) March 3, 2021

Visitor intent

This CX metric shows the reason behind a customer’s visit to your website. Beyond time spent on site, it reveals why they visited by giving customers multiple options and asking the reason behind their visit.

These insights are crucial when it comes to optimizing your website and improving the customer experience.

Task completion

Task completion works alongside visitor intent, measuring whether customers achieve their goal on your website.

Did they download the document they were looking for? Make a purchase? Find the answer to their question? To glean this information, keep it simple. A survey with a yes/no question is enough to let you know whether a visit was successful or not.

It’s that simple.

Customer effort score - CES

Customer effort score measures how much work a customer has to do when interacting with your brand - purchasing journey, payment procedure, customer support, returning goods, etc.

Using a scale from one to seven, that measures very easy to very difficult, customers are asked in CES surveys, “How easy was it to manage your request/use our service/use our product?” An easy experience will earn seven, while a bad experience gets one.

The CES metric identifies customer pain points so you can streamline the customer experience, and reduce potential churn.

Check the customer effort score stats from the Corporate Executive Board - CEB - consulting firm…

• 94% of customers that have an easy experience are more likely to repurchase, with 88% likely to spend more.
• 96% of customers struggling during their experience are more likely to churn, with 81% probably going to share their bad experience with friends and peers.

Yikes!

It’s not enough to merely WOW your customers. You have to provide an effortless customer experience.

Customer lifetime value - CLV

Customer lifetime value - lifetime value LTV - is the CX metric that shows how much a client is worth - net profit - to your business over their lifetime. It helps you prove the ROI with regard to customer acquisition costs - CAC - marketing, ongoing sales, operating expenses, manufacturing costs, etc.

To calculate the CLV, you need to estimate the value of your average sale, average number of transactions, and how long a relationship with an average customer lasts.

This is going to be easier for companies that have been around for a while, as they’ll be able to rely on historical customer data.

First up, calculate LTV by multiplying the average value of a sale, number of transactions, and customer retention time period.

Average sale value x transactions x retention period = LTV

But, this calculation doesn’t take into account operating costs - manufacturing the product, marketing and ads, etc. These should be considered when calculating CLV.

Average sale value x transactions x retention period x profit margin = CLV

Customer retention

Customer retention rate measures how many customers come back for more purchases, over a specific period of time. If you offer a streamlined, positive experience that excites consumers, you can expect the results to be high.

This CX metric works with your churn rate. The higher your customer retention, the lower your churn rate. For example, if your churn for a year is 20%, you’ve got 80% happy customers who remained loyal to your brand. Your retention rate equals 80%.

That 80% can be considered loyal customers. What does that mean?

Loyal customers are 5x more likely to purchase again and 4x more likely to recommend your brand. Plus, increasing your customer retention rate by 5% can increase your profits by 25-95%.

It’s a no brainer.

Churn rate

Your churn rate indicates how many customers you’ve lost, over a specific time period. It’s calculated by dividing the number of lost customers by the number of customers you started with, at the start of your specified time period. This is considered a lost business value.

For example, you won 100 customers at the start of Q2. At the end of Q3, you only have 80 left buying your products or services. Your churn rate is 20%.

Churn rate is the opposite of retention rate. If you have a customer-centric customer experience, churn will be lower.

This CX metric is critical. According to the Harvard Business Review, winning new customers can cost 5 to 25 times more than retaining existing ones. Increasing your customer retention rate by 5% can increase your profits by 25-95%.

Sales

If you’re a customer-centric brand with a cracking customer experience, you can expect this number to be high.

The sales metric tracks your bottom line. How many sales you made over a set time period. As you improve the customer experience, this number will increase.

Obvs.

Cart abandonment rate

Do you have consumers loading up their shopping cart on your e-commerce site, then clicking away from your site before making a purchase?

This may be a sign that the customer experience you’re offering isn’t up to scratch, and consumers are dissatisfied. Monitor the number of abandoned carts and make improvements to the customer journey during purchase to push those trolleys through payment.

Social listening

Social listening - conversational intelligence - monitors and analyzes how often consumers are talking about your brand on social media, and what they’re saying. Whether it’s good or bad.

It allows you to engage with consumers quickly, respond to comments in real time, manage risks, and prevent crises.

Quick Search sentiment analysis results allow brands to quickly identify a crisis.

Track the number of brand mentions on multiple channels and analyze the sentiment to understand if they’re positive or negative. You can then join conversations to solve an issue and engage with your audience.

Monitor consumer and customer conversations around keywords, language usage, hashtags, emoji, for a comprehensive view of how people are talking about your brand.

Conversation Clusters illustrate the main concerns expressed by the footballing community with regard to the European Super League proposal - Market Pulse.

Contact channel volume

How do your customers interact with you? Social media? Phone? Email?

Measuring this CX metric will show you which is the most popular means of communicating with your brand. For instance, if your customers are on Twitter asking support questions, you can assign a team member to monitor this channel along with the social media manager.

Talkwalker Analytics - which social media channels are your audience using?

Knowing where your audience is, means you can also target your marketing communication and hit them where they live.

Employee satisfaction

A strong customer experience starts with satisfied employees. Tracking employee satisfaction can be as simple as asking employees if they are satisfied with their jobs or having them rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. In general, employees who are more satisfied with their jobs naturally provide better customer service.

Boom! An awesome customer experience.

Average time resolution

This CX metric measures the time it takes to resolve an issue. Starting with a customer’s first interaction with regard to an issue, to when you solve the problem.

To calculate the average time resolution, divide the total of all resolution times by the number of issues solved in a set time period.

Stating the obvious, but customers are happier and enjoy a good experience when their issues are sorted out quickly.

First contact resolution - FCR

The first contact resolution CX metric tracks how many customers get their issue resolved during their first contact with your brand. It can include customer support calls, pricing queries, quotes, etc.

This customer experience metric is viewed as a percentage of all the calls your company receives, and demonstrates the speed at which your team helps customers, and highlights whether they have the correct tools and training for the job.

Takeaway

A successful customer experience strategy includes multiple CX metrics and feedback from every touch point in the customer journey. This helps you identify the drivers of the experience and highlights the actions to take to personalize customer relationships and create a streamlined customer experience.

Along with customer feedback, you should include operational data from your business - sales results, social data, marketing data, HR insights, website analytics, customer support issues, etc. This will enable you to understand consumer behavior and sentiment.

The more relevant data you gather, the better you'll be able to see what works and what doesn't. Leading to improvements across the board.

The first step to creating a good customer experience is listening to consumers and activating the voice of the customer. A conversational intelligence platform like Talkwalker will help you build a strong online community so you can understand consumers’ needs and build long-term relationships.

Using a consumer intelligence dashboard will help you see your audience in its entirety. Download our simulated CI dashboard template, to see what you could be missing...