5 customer experience metrics you should be observing
Customer experience metrics help improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and endorsement of your brand. Which metrics should you be observing?
Can you tell what your customers think of your business? That information lies in customer experience metrics.
Most customers value the experience a company provides as much as its products or services and will likely do business again after a personalized shopping experience. With buyer satisfaction directly tied to business revenue, it’s little wonder that customer experience metrics are invaluable.
What metrics should you be observing? We’ll find out but first, let’s define customer experience metrics.
Key takeaways:
- Customer experience metrics help improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and endorsement of your brand.
- Since it’s less costly to keep a customer than to acquire one, customer churn rate is an essential metric.
- Net promoter score is a proven method for predicting business growth.
- The customer satisfaction score lets a company know how happy a customer is with a particular interaction or their overall experience with a brand.
- There is an inverse relationship between customer effort and customer loyalty. The higher the effort, the less loyal the customer becomes.
What are customer experience metrics?
Also called customer success metrics, customer experience (CX) metrics measure aspects of customers’ interaction with your brand to help you improve three things:
- customer satisfaction
- customer loyalty
- customer endorsement
To that end, businesses take the knowledge gleaned from the metrics to create focused sales and marketing strategies, fix product pain points and train their customer support team, to name a few applications.
Which customer experience metrics should you study?
Here are the five CX metrics that businesses should look at to see where they stand with their customers.
1. Customer churn rate
The customer churn rate, also referred to as logo churn rate or account churn rate, tracks the customers lost during a specific period— typically 30 days. For example, if you had 20,000 customers at the beginning of the month and lost 200 customers throughout said month, your customer churn rate for those 30 days is 200/20,000 or 1%. The customer churn rate doesn’t factor in new customers acquired during the month.
Why is customer churn rate a valuable metric? The cost of keeping a customer is less than acquiring one.
2. Monthly recurring revenue
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) tracks your total profits earned in a month. The formula is the number of monthly active customers multiplied by the average revenue per user. For example, if you had 10,000 subscribers in a month and your average revenue per user was $50, your MRR is $500,000.
What can you learn from the MRR? If you provide a good product and service, customers will be willing to continue paying for it. If they tack on optional services or features, your business is doing something right.
3. Net promoter score (NPS)
The one question to ask when it comes to determining the net promoter score is:
“On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?”
Businesses place respondents into three categories:
- Detractors – These are the individuals that answer one through six. They will likely have a damaging impact on a company by leaving a bad review or expressing their negative experience with a brand to friends and colleagues.
- Passives – The passives reply with a seven or an eight. There isn’t brand loyalty. They won’t hinder your business, but they also won’t promote it.
- Promoters – Promoters are the ones that answer nine or ten. These loyal customers will help your business grow organically by positive word-of-mouth.
To calculate the net promoter score you:
- add up the number of individuals in the detractors, passives, and promoters categories, respectively
- convert the number for each category into a percentage (e.g., detractors/total people x 100)
- subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, ignoring the passives
Determining if a net promoter score is decent depends on the industry. Typically, net promoter scores fall between 20 and 40 percent. Striving for five points above your industry’s standard is a reasonable goal.
Why is the net promoter score so powerful? It’s a proven method for predicting business growth.
4. Customer satisfaction score
Also known as CSAT, the customer satisfaction score lets a company know how happy a customer is with a particular interaction or their overall experience with a brand. Businesses rely on CSAT as a customer loyalty metric.
As with the net promoter score, CSAT asks one question:
“On a scale of one to five, with one being very dissatisfied and five being very satisfied, how happy are you with our product/service?”
You also divide your respondents by detractors (those who answered one or two), passives (those who answered three), and promoters (those who answered four or five). You obtain the customer satisfaction score by:
- adding up the number of promoters
- dividing that number by the total number of responses
- multiplying by 100
The result will be a percentage.
Why is CSAT important? Happy customers are not likely to cancel a service. In fact, they may upgrade their service or add on more.
5. Customer effort score
Also called CES, the customer effort score lets a company know how much effort a customer experienced during a particular interaction with their brand. Businesses also rely on CES as a customer loyalty metric.
The question to determine the customer effort score is:
“How much do you agree with the following statement: The company made it easy for me to solve my issue.”
The customer can choose from seven choices, ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” You calculate the score by taking the average of the responses. In other words, add up the scores and divide by the number of respondents. Companies should strive for a score of six or higher.
Why should you analyze customer effort scores? There is an inverse relationship between customer effort and customer loyalty. The higher the effort, the less loyal the customer becomes. The opposite is also true: lower customer effort means higher customer loyalty.
Improve customer satisfaction with Optimizely
Optimizely’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP) will help you deliver excellent digital customer experiences with insights on where your brand stands with your target buyers.
