Customers today have become the center of every businesses' short-term and long-term strategy with increasing competition and myriad of choices available to empowered customers. Business leaders and executives are investing significantly to improve customer experience. In the presence of huge number of similar products and services CX acts as a powerful differentiator and leads to increased revenue and lasting competitive advantage. In this scenario, it has become very important for organizations to measure their customer experience (CX) effort and outcomes in line with meeting customer expectations. Without CX measurement, brands cannot determine the impact of their CX strategy and reassess the same for any shortcomings and improvements.

Customer experience measurement is not a quantitative analysis and hence is a difficult task to understand the pain points of your customer in their journey with you. To measure how customers are experiencing and feeling with your product and service offering, you need to move towards qualitative analysis and yet find ways to quantify it. In this article, we will address this issue in detail and discuss some of the common measurement metrics for evaluating your customer experience strategy.

Measuring CX with Right CX Metrics

Measuring your CX performance starts with selection of right CX metrics. The objective of every prominent CX metric is to track whether your solutions, aligned with your CX strategy, to address the problem of customers are actually working. And if not, how can you then improve your efforts in this direction. We enlist below some of the metrics used by successful companies in the CX domain.

Net Promoter Score

NPS provides you a larger picture to know the percentage of customers who are and who are not willing to recommend your company to their friends, family and acquaintances. NPS is easy to understand, faster to deliver and gauge customer loyalty. NPS asks users in a survey about how likely they are to refer the product or service to a friend or colleague. Based on the ratings received on a scale of 10, users are divided into promoters (9-10), passives (6-8) and detractors (below 6). Promoters signify delightful experiences whereas dissatisfied detractors are not likely to recommend and give negative reviews to others. NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors with that of promotes excluding the neutral response.

Average Handling Time (ART) / First Response Time (FRT) :

It is the measure of the rate of response given to customers when they raise an issue with customer support. It is generally measured as the average amount of time taken by the customer support to resolve the issue from the point it is initially raised by the customer. It covers the time spent while interacting with the customer on various touch-points including calls, emails, chats or social media. Customer expect fast response times and companies that meet customers’ expectations score high on CX. Conversely, brands that do not respond in timely manner find customers frustrated and hence CX drops. McKinsey reports that customers expect help within 5 minutes and with emergence of live chats they want instant response.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) :

with your organization based on a survey. Customers answer according to their experience with your customer support or while they return a product. Companies thus use CSAT scores to understand how satisfied customers are with their specific products or services. A CSAT survey is measured by asking customers to rate your offerings on the basis of their overall satisfaction while interacting with you. Respondents can rate you on a scale of 1 (dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied). CSAT result can be calculated by dividing responses between 4-5 with total response and multiplying it with 100. CSAT surveys are easy to understand, simple and rich with insights. CSAT metrics helps in gauging happiness with recent interactions and can help you make necessary improvements with respect to the most important areas and attributes of your customers.

Customer Effort Score (CES) :

Customer Effort Score has become popular quite lately, as ease of experience with the brand is a better indicator of customer loyalty than just satisfaction. CES is less common that NPS or CSAT but is way easier to understand and use- providing insights that can help you improve things quickly. It reflects the amount of effort a customer has to apply in order to have access to your products or services. CES is the most telling metric to show how positive your customer’s experience has been. A CES survey ask the customers as to how much effort they had to make to deal with the company. It has specific ranges on a scale from 1-5 with easy, neither and difficult as the options. CES score is arrived at by subtracting the percentage of difficult from the easy. Companies can thus work accordingly to make their interaction as easy as possible for customers to boost CX, customer loyalty and higher satisfaction.

Which is the best metric for CX measurement ?

There is no one metric which is one size fits all. You will have to use a combination of metrics to track your success and failures and find out which metric has the most impact for you to give your customers a seamless and enjoyable experience. But the real problem lies in finding right time, questions and technology to receive accurate feedback in the absence of which a satisfied experience may reflect as negative score during the survey. Selecting and utilizing metrics is simply a means to track them for you to make adjustment to your CX strategy and to make further improvements. A successful customer experience program requires building up on the feedback received with these metrics to provide superior experience to customers at all touch-points. At Espire, we help our clients manage, measure and improve CX metrics for their end customers in our journey towards our customers growth story.

What Next?

We have discussed various metrices here but is it a simple, straight forward process to measure all these metrics? No, it’s not. Measurement of every metric brings in a set of challenges with respect to time, tools, approach, precision etc. So, stay tuned as we will discuss more about CX metrics, its challenges and solutions in our successive blogs.