3 Customer Experience Metrics and KPIs That Count

We’ve previously discussed the value of customer feedback and talked about why customer onboarding matters; in this post, we’ll dive into the specific KPIs and metrics you should be tracking to improve your customer service and experience.

Apart from exploring the most commonly used customer experience KPIs, including the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES), we also take a look at:

• Why is it important to set customer experience KPIs?
• How often should you track and review KPIs?
• Which touch points should you utilize to measure customer satisfaction?

Read on to find out more!

3 Customer experience KPIs for tracking customer satisfaction

Mention the phrase “customer experience KPIs”, and NPS, CSAT, and CES immediately come to mind. These are used by companies across the globe; you might choose to start off with just one of these KPIs, or use all three in conjunction.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS is an index that’s used to measure customer loyalty toward a company.

Customers are asked to specify how likely they are to recommend a company to their friends on a scale of 0 to 10, and based on their response, they’re bucketed into three different categories — Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. The goal is to maximize your number of Promoters while minimizing your Passives and Detractors, which will give you a high NPS score.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The CSAT is a customer satisfaction survey methodology that measures how happy a customer is about a specific product, transaction, or interaction with a company.

In order to measure CSAT, you’d ask your survey recipient to rate their satisfaction level on a scale of 1 to 5.

CSAT scores are typically expressed as a percentage scale; if you have a CSAT score of 100%, this means that all your customers are satisfied, if you have a score of 0%, this indicates that none of your customers are satisfied.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Last but not least, the CES is a customer satisfaction metric that measures customers’ ease of experience. In other words, the CES tells you how much effort your customers are required to put into getting an issue resolved or obtaining a service that your business offers.

Here, participants’ answers are graded on a 1 to 7 scale, with 1 representing “Strongly Disagree” and 7 representing “Strongly Agree”.

The idea behind this metric is that organizations can boost customer loyalty by reducing customer effort. As this Harvard Business Review report notes, business owners often assume that they have to wow their customers in order to increase customer loyalty — but the easiest way to increase loyalty is to make it easy for your customers to get their job done.

Why is it important to set customer experience KPIs?

As management guru Peter Drucker says, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

If you don’t set customer experience KPIs (and regularly review them), it’ll be difficult for you to evaluate how your company is doing when it comes to customer service.

Think of it this way: You wouldn’t dream of running a new ad campaign without tracking key metrics such as Cost Per Click (CPC), click through rate, and revenue generated. The same goes for customer experience — you need to track and review the relevant KPIs and metrics, so that you can gauge whether your customer service efforts are paying off, and fine-tune your strategies if necessary.

How often should you track and review KPIs?

Unfortunately, simply sending out a single NPS survey once a year isn’t enough. Ideally, you should be tracking and reviewing your customer experience KPIs throughout the entire year.

Rather than holding your breath all year and then hoping for the best, spot check satisfaction and other metrics at key points throughout your customers’ journey. Automate and integrate with your existing processes, so that ready-to-go surveys connect with your customers at exactly the right moment.

Plus, if you receive low ratings, trigger real-time alerts to your team — or automate thank-you emails for high ratings! Addressing an issue before it’s too late — or celebrating a success — can have a huge impact on both the service you’re providing and your organization’s reputation.

Which touch points should you utilize to measure customer satisfaction?

To get a more accurate picture of customer experience, we recommend measuring customer satisfaction at various key touch points along the customer journey.

For instance, if you survey a customer immediately after their first purchase, this will help you uncover insights that you can use to improve your sales /purchase process. Was it easy for your customer to purchase a product? Did they encounter any issues or hiccups along the way? You can potentially answer these questions (and more) with a perfectly-timed survey.

On top of that, you’ll also want to survey your customer after they’ve received their product. If you’re running an eCommerce store, you might be concerned about whether the product arrived in time, and whether your customer is satisfied with the quality of the product. If you’re heading a SaaS company, you’ll want to find out if your customer faced any problems during their onboarding process, and whether they struggled with learning how to use your product.

A final word on customer experience KPIs

With so many survey tools and platforms at your fingertips, tracking customer experience has never been easier. If you haven’t set any customer experience KPIs for your company, and you’re still going by the “feel” of things as opposed to looking at actual data and numbers, you’ve got no excuse… go ahead and implement those customer experience KPIs today!