Customer experience, or CX, describes how customers feel when interacting with the brand, influences how they think about the brand and determines whether or not they make purchases. Thus, customer experience is a top priority for most businesses. Knowing how to measure it is crucial to providing exceptional customer experience.
This guide explains how to measure customer experience by closely examining the process and metrics involved.
What Does it Mean to Measure Customer Experience?
To those not in the know, customer experience may seem like an effervescent concept challenging to pin down, but this could not be further from reality. Customer experience consists of many quantitative and qualitative data points that can be collected, tracked, and evaluated.
How to Measure Customer Experience
Customer experience is multifaceted and dynamic. Measuring customer experience requires a close look at several distinct factors. Businesses can use a combination of tools and metrics to gain insight into various perspectives on customer experience.
Tools for Measuring Customer Experience
Customer experience insights come from the following tools:
- Journey Maps - From the first impression to the completion of a sale and beyond, a journey map tells the story of how a customer interacts with a business throughout the lifetime of the relationship. Journey maps reveal behavior patterns and pain points that translate to opportunities to enhance the customer experience.
- Surveys - After a purchase or customer support interaction, it is customary for businesses to invite feedback from customers. Surveys typically use the Likert scale to generate quantifiable data and offer space for customers to share their thoughts to gather more open-ended, qualitative information.
- Reviews - Public review forums are filled with information on various customer experiences. Businesses can benefit from keeping tabs on online reviews posted to Google, social media, and other review platforms.
- User Data - Demographic information, browsing habits, purchase history, and other types of user data help businesses understand who interacts with their brand and how.
- Customer Support Records - Customer support records can reveal pain points and other common issues that must be resolved to improve the product, service quality, and customer experience.
- Return and Exchange Records - Businesses need to uncover the reason why one particular product or style is frequently returned or exchanged. Perhaps the offering needs improvement or more information about the product is necessary to ensure customer satisfaction.
Metrics for Monitoring Customer Experience
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) - The NPS describes the percentage of customers who love the brand, feel neutral about the brand, or do not like the brand. The percentages are determined through a survey sent to customers asking how likely they are to recommend the brand to a friend on a Likert scale of 0-10. NPS is the percentage of detractor responses subtracted from the promoter responses
- Customer Effort Score (CES) - The CES describes the customers' experiences with navigation. To obtain CES data, businesses can invite customers to rank an interaction or experience with a product as easy, neutral, or difficult. The CES is calculated by finding the average of all customer effort ratings.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) - This customer service metric is collected through a survey that gauges how satisfied a client is after interacting with the business. They may be asked to fill out a satisfaction survey after talking to an agent or buying a product or service. To collect the most accurate CSAT, businesses need to send a survey immediately after a purchase or interaction.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - The CLV describes how much a customer has spent with the business over their entire relationship compared to the amount a business spends to keep the customer. Companies can track this figure over time to see if a customer is satisfied and making more purchases or suddenly spending less.
- Customer Churn Rate - The churn rate is the percentage of customers who cancel subscription-based purchases over a specific period. Churn is inevitable, but it is essential to learn why it is happening to try to reduce it as much as possible.
- Customer Retention Rate - The customer retention rate is the opposite of the churn rate. It measures how many customers are retained over a specific period of time.
- Customer Support Ticket Trends - Customer support tickets can be reviewed to reveal patterns. If there are recurring issues, businesses must try to uncover and address the root causes. Perhaps the product or service needs revision, or customers could benefit from additional resources to better understand the product.
- Customer Journey Analytics - Customer journey analytics help companies learn more about a customer's motivations, needs, and pain points as they interact with the business.
Optimizing Customer Experience with Encora
Fast-growing tech companies partner with Encora to outsource product development and drive growth. We are deeply expert in the various disciplines, tools, and technologies that power the emerging economy, and this is one of the primary reasons that clients choose Encora over the many strategic alternatives that they have.
Contact us to learn more about customer experience.
