Customer experience (CX) is critical to enhancing business growth and gaining an edge on competitors. A recent study by Walker asserts that customer experience will overtake both price and product quality as the brand differentiator by 2020.
In order to maximise value from the customer experience, you need to be able to measure it. How do you do this? After all, CX can seem very qualitative and encompasses so many elements of the business. In a world where you can follow the customer journey from beginning to ongoing service, there could be so many reasons for an abandoned shopping cart or a failure to repeat purchase.
Simply asking customers whether they enjoyed their shopping experience won’t necessarily get you clear answers. No one wants to fill out a lengthy survey when their purchase has gone without a hitch, which can skew your results. And when 65% of consumers are brand loyal, the CX of one transaction won’t necessarily help you understand whether the lifetime relationship is as good as it could be.
You need a more holistic approach to measure CX, and these 5 metrics will help you get that clear overall picture.
Metric 1: Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is where most organisations direct their CX focus. You can split CSAT into explicit and implicit metrics:
- Explicit: Surveys and questionnaires sent to customers or placed at the end of online checkouts asking directly about satisfaction levels
- Implicit: Product review ratings, timeliness delivery statistics and mystery shopping scores are examples. These can help highlight aspects of customer satisfaction that may be missed in direct survey questions
Metric 2: Customer loyalty and retention
If customers keep coming back, you must be doing something right. In a study across 20 industries, Tempkin Group found that customers who had received a good CX were 54% more likely to buy again than consumers who had received a very poor CX.
Look out for metrics like:
- Repeat orders and return rates: Are customers coming back? Are they purchasing the same product or something different? Are they keeping what they order?
- Purchase frequency and average order size: How often do customers return, and are they purchasing more and more each time?
Participation rates in loyalty programmes: Are customers getting on board for the long haul and taking advantage of offers?
Metric 3: Advocacy
Are customers recommending and endorsing your products and brand? This is a key way to tell if you are delivering a good CX.
Critical things to monitor are:
- Price sensitivity: How much are sales affected by changes in pricing?
- Sentiment scores and trust ratings: Are people going out of their way to advocate your product or service online?
- Event participation: Are customers getting involved in your brand?
Metric 4: Quality and operations
This is perhaps the most understated of all of the CX metrics, yet the premise is simple: if your product or service fails to meet expectations, the customer experience will be sub-par no matter what you do afterwards to fix the problem.
Research shows that 42% of customers turn away from a company after just 2 negative experiences, so ensuring quality from the start is crucial to achieving a good CX.
Think about ways you monitor quality and service internally and incorporate those into your CX analysis.
Metric 5: Employee engagement
This is one of the most important metrics, yet it’s rarely considered in CX-related analyses. According to a Gartner survey, 86% of organisations rank employee engagement as having an equal or greater impact than other CX challenges.
Again, the concept is straightforward. Unless your employees are engaged and keen to work represent your brand, you won’t be able to address other CX issues effectively.
Remember: Customer experience measurement requires a holistic approach
When you look at these 5 different aspects of CX, you’re in a strong position to monitor and improve CX systematically – and ensure you’re doing everything possible to exceed expectations, boost loyalty and drive growth.
