How To Measure Customer Experience

Customer experience (CX) is the new competitive battleground. In today's day and age, customers have more choices than ever before, and they're not afraid to switch brands if they're not happy with their experience.

73% of consumers say that CX is a deciding factor when making purchase decisions.

In this blog post, we'll discuss the basics of CX measurement and provide you with a few tips on how to get started so that you can ensure you're providing the best possible experience for your customers.

Important CX metrics

Creating a strategy for measuring the success of your CX team is essential, but it's also important to choose the right metrics to measure. It's worth noting that the specific CX metrics a business chooses to measure will be highly dependent on its business model or industry. With that said, here are a few metrics that are important to consider: 

First Contact Resolution Rate

FCR or First Contact Resolution rate measures the percentage of customers who have their issue resolved on the first contact with customer support. A high first contact resolution rate is indicative of a well-trained support team that is able to effectively handle customer issues. A low score, on the other hand, could indicate a need for more training or improved processes.

Net Promoter Score

‍NPS or Net Promoter Score is a metric that measures customer loyalty and helps businesses gauge how likely their customers are to recommend them to friends or family. NPS can be calculated by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service on a scale from 0-10 and then dividing them into three groups: promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), and detractors (0-6). 

Customer Satisfaction Score‍

CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Score is a metric that measures how satisfied customers are with their overall experience. CSAT can be calculated by asking customers how satisfied they are with their experience on a scale from 1-5. Lower scores indicate that customers are generally unsatisfied with your services, while higher scores of 4 or 5 indicate satisfied customers.

Customer Churn Rate‍

CCR or Customer Churn Rate is a metric that measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a given period of time. A high churn rate indicates that customers are not finding value in your product or service and are quickly leaving for alternatives. 

Other metrics

Apart from these key metrics, here are a few more you might want to consider measuring in order to judge how your CX efforis are performing: 

• Retention: How likely is a customer to remain with your company? 
• Purchase loyalty: How likely is a customer to continue making purchases with your company? 
• Waiting time: How long are customers waiting in order to speak to representatives or resolve their issues? 
• Meeting expectations: Are you able to meet and exceed customer expectations? 

What is a CX measurement strategy?

A CX measurement strategy is a plan for tracking, measuring, and improving your company's customer experience — often in real time. If you don't have a CX measurement strategy in place, it will be challenging to improve your customer experience because you won't have a way to track your progress and ensure you're moving toward your goals.

There are a few reasons why it's important to have a CX measurement strategy in place:

• It helps you track your progress: Without a CX measurement strategy, it will be challenging to track your progress and see if you're making improvements to your customer experience.‍
• It helps you benchmark your performance: A CX measurement strategy also allows you to benchmark your performance so that you can see how you're doing compared to other companies in your industry. This is important because it helps you to set realistic goals for improvement against which you can measure your progress.‍
• Enables you to make data-driven decisions: Perhaps most importantly, a CX measurement strategy enables you to make data-driven decisions about how to improve the customer experience. Without data, it's challenging to know what changes you should make in order to have the most significant impact on your customer experience.

How to develop a CX strategy

Before starting to measure the success of your CX team, there are a few things you need to do in order to set yourself up for success. These include:

Understand your ICPs

In order to provide a great experience for your customers, you first need to understand who they are. This means having a clear understanding of your ideal customer profile (ICP). For example, if you're a B2B company, your ICP might be businesses with 50-100 employees in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry. 

You can get very granular with ICPs and the more research you put into creating these profiles, the better. They are your lodestar and should be what you use to chart your course forward.

Once you have a clear understanding of who your ICP is, you can start to think about what their needs and wants are, including the type of service they expect from you.

Map every support and CX touchpoint

Another important step in developing a CX strategy is to map out every support and customer experience touchpoint. This means taking a close look at every single interaction your customers have with your company, from the first time they visit your website to when they call customer support.

Once you've mapped out all of the touchpoints, you can start to think about how to improve each one. For example, if you notice that customers are having trouble finding your phone number on your website, you might want to add it to the header so that it's more visible. In this same vein, if your customers are repeatedly asking the same question to customer support, you might want to add a FAQ section to your website so that they can find the answer themselves.

Implement data collection and analysis

In order to make data-driven decisions about how to improve the customer experience, you need to have a way to collect and analyze data. There are a few different ways you can do this, but one of the best is to use customer experience software. We've reviewed the best ones in our 'best CX platforms' blog post.

Conclusion

Customer experience is no longer a nice-to-have — it's a necessity for businesses that want to stay competitive. And in order to create a successful CX strategy, businesses need to have a way to measure the success of their CX team.

Without measuring the success of your CX team, it's impossible to know if you're making progress or if there's room for improvement. By understanding the different types of CX metrics and how to choose the right ones for your business, you can set your team up for success.