In an increasingly crowded marketplace, merely being able to sell your product or service doesn’t always guarantee business growth. You also have to make customer satisfaction and customer experience management a top priority.
Delivering great customer experience (CX) leads to increased loyalty, lower churn, more referrals, positive word of mouth, and higher-value customers.
- Companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn on average an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience.
- Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.
As competition and buyer empowerment compound, customer experience (CX) is proving to be the only truly durable competitive advantage. Organizations must learn how to measure, manage, and act on these 3 most important customer experience metrics (CX metrics).
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
No single CX metric is going to give you a complete picture, and you will have to discover how to adapt the big three to your business case. Nonetheless, these customer experience survey methodologies and metrics are used across industries and serve as a great place to start as you grow your program.
How Do I Measure Customer Experience?
Measuring customer experience (CX) requires a layered approach that can include in-depth user interviews and gathering data at key points of contact, as well as tracking CX metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a CX metric that surveys customers based on one question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”
- Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal, satisfied customers who will help fuel your business growth by buying and referring other customers to your business.
- Passives (score 7-8) are also satisfied customers, but their lack of enthusiasm may render them vulnerable to offerings from the competition.
- Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who may impede your growth and spread negative word of mouth about your business.
NPS is such a valuable tool for measuring not just customer experience, but also customer loyalty, since it transcends single experiences. It is often referred to as a brand or relationship metric. Most NPS software solutions will ask the customer to draw on the sum total of their experiences with your company, not just the most recent, making it a good indicator for repurchasing (and growth). As a result, it is often considered a “board-level” metric.
For larger organizations, NPS on its own may be too simplistic of a metric. It helps you understand that customers have had a positive or negative experience, but not necessarily why that’s the case. This is why NPS is often paired with an open-ended follow-up question, like “Care to tell us why?” This allows your organization to capture rich qualitative feedback that can guide improvement efforts from product to support to marketing.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is the most popular transactional metric. CSAT customer satisfaction surveys ask a customer how satisfied they are with a recent interaction — often a purchase or a customer service call — on a rating scale.
CSAT is flexible and highly customizable. In some cases, emojis (smileys, frowns) are used instead of numerical scales to overcome any language barrier.
In the realm of CX, a short CSAT survey is most often used to gauge customer satisfaction with interactions with support personnel. It’s a great tool for identifying support agents who may need more training or for quantifying the impact of your last team-wide training effort. You will need to dig into the qualitative feedback you receive to understand which attributes of satisfaction are most important to your customers and which areas require improvement.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys ask the customer, “How much effort did you have to expend to handle your request?” This is scored on a numeric scale. It’s a customer service metric that is typically used to improve systems that may frustrate customers.
Customers may then respond on a 5- or 7-point scale, and scores are calculated simply by getting the average of all the collected responses. Reducing customer effort can be a valuable marketing investment that makes your brand stand out in a sea of unaccommodating, not-very-helpful competitors.
Advocates of CES advocates believe that when it comes to customer service or support, “effortlessness” is the most relevant attribute of customer satisfaction. According to the Harvard Business Review, CES can predict repurchasing even better than CSAT, making it a go-to critical metric for companies that depend heavily on successful onboarding and customer success to lay the foundation for repeat purchases.
How Can I Improve Customer Experience?
Improving customer experience starts with tracking your current metrics, listening to customers, and analyzing data for insights that will be essential to forming an action plan. Keep in mind that this is a cycle that your organization has to do all over again.
Instead of sending out feedback or customer satisfaction surveys only once or twice a year, you may consider investing in a customer feedback platform that enables your organization to achieve always-on listening. This means that you’re able to capture feedback from various channels, such as social media, online reviews, and targeted surveys that deliver results in real time.
Tracked and managed the right way, the CX metrics above should help support your organization’s commitment to putting customers first. They’re useful for collecting valuable sentiment data, generating actionable insights, and predicting future behavior. Most importantly, these metrics enable your organization to take the guesswork out of your strategy, accurately measure customer experience, and inspire more moments of customer delight.
