It doesn't matter if you're in B2B or B2C; a good customer experience is critical to your company's success.
But how do you determine CX and whether your customers are happy with your services or products? What data should you be tracking?
What are CX Metrics?
Customer experience (CX) metrics are the data that allow you to not only track, but also measure and analyse the effectiveness of your customer experience strategy.
They can measure anything from your customers' loyalty to your brand, how satisfied they are with your service, and even how much effort your customers must go through to use your service.
These metrics will provide a clear snapshot of your customer's journey, so you should collect data at every touchpoint to ensure you keep delivering a smooth and painless journey.
Why should we collect CX Data?
We're asked this question quite a lot. Measuring your CX metrics can be very time consuming and sometimes even expensive, so many businesses question whether the data is worth collecting.
However, research has shown that 81% of companies view strong customer experience as the best way to stay ahead of their competition.
There are so many ways to use CX data to help grow your business (and leave your competitors in the dust). CX metrics can supply you with quantitative and qualitative data to guide your decisions.
If you're looking to improve your customer journey, CX data can help you understand where your customers' pain points are and provide suggestions on how to fix these.
We all know that more than theoretical support is needed to encourage wide scale change within businesses. You need quantitative data to support the decisions you've made. If you've made changes to your customer support systems, CX metrics are an easy way to show your changes' positive or negative effects.
You don't have to make changes to measure your customer experience. CX metrics can provide an accurate picture of your company's performance, which is vital if you want to survive in any competitive landscape.
We're increasingly encountering people who understand the importance of CX metrics but need help figuring out where to start. Research has shown that most customer experience programs fail to deliver what they promise and that CX professionals are not measuring the right metrics for their companies.
This is where we can help!
Our top 4 CX metrics
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter score is one of the most common ways of measuring your CX. It is a simple question that can measure your customer's loyalty to your company and how likely they are to recommend you to friends and family.
We've all seen it before.
Once you've completed an interaction with a company, whether after a purchase, dealing with customer service or even returning a product, they will send a follow up email. This email will say something like:
"How likely are you to recommend our service to a friend?"
They typically ask you to rate the likelihood on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being not likely, and 10 being very likely. Respondents are then separated into 3 categories.
Detractors: Anyone who scores between a 0 and a 6 has a negative view of your customer support and is unlikely to recommend it to their friends, and they may even complain about you to them.
Neutrals: A much smaller catchment, the Neutrals are anyone who scores a 7 or an 8 on the scale. As the name suggests, these people have a neutral opinion of your company. Whilst they aren't likely to complain about you or say anything negative, you haven't impressed them enough to recommend you.
Promoters: These people have rated you a 9 or a 10 on the scale, and they've been so impressed by your customer service that they're likely to recommend your service to their friends.
If you want to calculate your NPS, it's relatively simple!
% Promoters – % Detractors = NPS
You detract the percentage of your responses which are detractors from your percentage of responses which are promoters, leaving you with a final number ranging from -100 to 100. This is your Net Promoter Score.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
The CSAT is a performance metric you can use to track exactly how satisfied your customers are with both your services and products.
It measures the average customer satisfaction score across all respondents to your survey to provide an accurate look at how your customers feel and view their interactions with you.
The CSAT is one of the most straightforward CX metrics to collect and measure. It's also one of the most frequently used. Like NPS, you've probably come across this as it's also sent directly after specific interactions such as post-purchase, post-delivery or post-interactions with customer support. Again, customers are asked to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10.
The question will normally look something like this:
"How satisfied were you with your experience today?"
However, this can be altered and made more specific depending on the situation. For example, if you send the question post-delivery, you could ask how satisfied the customer was with their delivery. If it was following a customer service interaction, then you could focus on that.
To calculate your CSAT score:
Satisfied Customers/Responses)x100 = CSAT
Divide your number of satisfied responses, either those scoring 4-5 or 8-10, by your total number of responses, and then multiply this number by 100. This will leave you with your final Customer Satisfaction Score.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The Customer Effort Score is a CX metric that measures how easy it is for a customer to do business with you. In other words, it is how much effort the customer requires to interact/complete a task with you.
One of the key reasons to measure your CES is to help develop your customer journey. If you're trying to create a smooth and seamless customer journey, it's vital that you understand where the pain points are. With your CES for each touchpoint, you can understand which ones are forcing your customers to put in the most effort and, therefore, will know which areas require the most improvement.
CES is used much less frequently than the NPS or CSAT, but it's still a useful CX metric. Customers are usually asked how much they agree with a statement, which will be something like:
"It was easy for me to resolve my issue today."
The responses then tend to be collected using a Likert Scale, ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree, with each answer having a number associated with it (1-7). Once you have collected these responses, calculating your CES is incredibly simple.
Sum of Responses/Number of Responses = CES
All you need to do is divide the total sum of your responses (the scores allocated to each answer) by your total number of responses. This will then leave you with your Customer Effort Score.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
Your Customer Retention Rate measures the percentage of customers who will stay with your business over a given period and is connected to your churn rate, which is the number of customers who will leave over a given period.
Your CRR is a particularly useful CX metric as it can show you exactly how long after starting to use your service, customers are likely to stop using them. This helps you examine issues around the specific period in the post-purchase journey and target customers with messaging and deals, encouraging them to continue using your service when they'd likely stop.
Your customer retention rate differs from the other metrics we've mentioned as it does not require direct interaction with the customer to measure. Instead, you need to know 3 pieces of readily available data:
Starting Customers (S): How many customers you have at the start of the period you're measuring.
Gained Customers (G): How many customers you've gained over the measured period.
End Customers (E): The total number of customers you have at the end of the period measured.
Although CRR is slightly more difficult to calculate than the other metrics we've mentioned, as long as you have a calculator to hand, it should be easy to work out!
((E-G)/S)x100 = CRR
To calculate your CRR, subtract your gained customers from your end customers, then divide this number by your starting customers. Once you have this number, multiply it by 100 to find your Customer Retention Rate.
What's next?
That's it! We've told you everything we can, so it's up to you to decide which CX metrics to track.
Still can't choose? Reach out to us.
Here at CX Consultants, we have over 25 years of helping people measure their CX processes and offerings. Why not get in touch if you need help ensuring that you're measuring the right things and find out how we can help you today?
If you have any questions or want to discuss your CX metrics and strategy, get in touch, we're here to help.