Learn how to measure customer experience with these CX metrics

Net Promoter Score (NPS®)

You’ll want to know how loyal your customers are: how likely they are to recommend you and buy goods or services from you in future. The Net Promoter Score measures customer loyalty based on one simple survey question: ‘How likely is it that you would recommend [Organisation X/Product Y/Service Z] to a friend or colleague?’

Respondents give a rating between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely).You then remove the neutral responses and subtracts the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters to give an NPS score.

NPS is the most common customer experience metric – it’s easy to understand, quick to complete and gives a big-picture customer loyalty gauge.

Learn about Qualtrics NPS Software

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)

You’ll want to know how satisfied your customers are with your products or services. CSAT measures customer satisfaction based on a question: ‘How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [goods/service] you received?’ Respondents use a ratings scale between 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied).

The two highest ratings (4 and 5 on the scale) are used to calculate a percentage score: 100% being total customer satisfaction and 0% total customer dissatisfaction. CSAT evolved from market research surveys, and is easy to understand, simple to use, and can be rich in insight.

CES (Customer Effort Score)

You’ll want your customers to be able to interact with you as effortlessly as possible. CES asks a question like: ‘How easy was it to deal with our company today?’ giving simple options: Easy, Neither, Difficult. Subtract the percentage of ‘Difficult’ respondents from the ‘Easy’ ones to give the CES.

CES is relatively new as less common that NPS or CSAT, but it’s easy to understand and use, and supplies actionable data so you can change things quickly.

Learn about Qualtrics Customer Analytics Software

Other metrics

NPS, CSAT and CES are overall measures of satisfaction/sentiment/ease, but defining other metrics allows you to dive deep into the areas that matter most for your business or where you can have the biggest impact. You might choose:

• Retention loyalty – how likely are you to remain with us?
• Purchase loyalty – how likely are you to continue buying from us?
• Meeting expectation – how much better (or worse) was your experience compared with your expectation?
• Waiting time – how long did you have to wait in a call queue? etc.
• Online – ‘how easy was it to find what you were looking for?’

The choice of metric is not as important as you think – companies will not succeed or fail based on a metric. Driving improvement is important – the metrics you choose are simply that, a score you can track to monitor your improvements.

The most successful customer experience programs include an overall metric as well as gathering feedback across a whole range of touchpoints and to help identify the key drivers of the experience and prioritise the actions that will have the biggest impact.

As well as feedback from your customers, you can also include operational data – thinks like website analytics, sales figures and HR data – to make more links between what customers do and how they feel. Essentially, the more data points you have, the more opportunities you have to identify what works, what doesn’t and what you need to focus on to improve.