Numbers are unique to humanity. We use them to gauge, order, calculate, structure, plan, develop, and make sense of the world. So to assess a quality concept like customer experience (CX), you need precise numbers like key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure it.
Customer experience KPIs help you evaluate how your product or service is doing across various touchpoints in the consumer market. But first let’s break down what customer experience is.
CX is the sum of all the engagement and interactions you have with customers throughout their lifetime association with your brand. Product ads, call-centre outreach initiatives, payment processes, social media engagement, and customer support calls are all a part of it.
But why the fuss about CX when your product pages work and the tech team can fix any glitches? How does good CX affect your bottom line, or even how much? The answer is a whole lot.
Why do customer experience KPIs matter?
According to Zendesk’s 2020 report, half of all consumers surveyed said they would go out of their way to buy from brands they feel loyal to. Although this fact is great for businesses to know, winning over loyal customers is no easy thing.
Large-scale digital migration has given most of us the availability of choice at a mouse click. Furthermore, with quality competition from rival brands, modern consumers are in the driving seat and ready to switch lanes at the slightest dissatisfaction with your business. It takes less than a second to lose a customer online. So how do you stand out and build loyalty?
In the new age of consumerism, product has given way to experience.
Consumer purchasing behaviour relies increasingly on the unique CX you provide, as more and more people want memorable moments with brands before they buy in.
You have to deliver superior CX for your business to survive in such a lively digital ecosystem while producing satisfied customers. Give consumers a unique brand experience and you’re sure to make your presence felt in a busy ecommerce marketplace.
Top-notch CX increases purchase interest and generates customer loyalty, serving you well by boosting sales, customer relationships, word-of-mouth referrals, business growth, and annual profits.
However, to assess whether your CX is up to the mark, beyond it, or sub-par, you first need to quantify it.
Handy metrics like KPIs let you do that by measuring CX through solid numbers. Additionally, the customer experience KPIs relevant to your business can give you a good indication of how far you’ve come and where you need to go to improve.
Insights from customer experience KPIs can convert to actionable solutions for improving overall customer loyalty and satisfaction rates.
The trick lies in turning negative scores into positive ones by developing specific action plans that can spearhead change in your CX strategy.
But what kind of customer experience KPIs should you be tracking?
Three categories of customer experience KPIs
The goal of every business is to outperform its competitors. Customer experience KPIs help you get there by assessing your brand performance across several customer-centric parameters.
Some customer experience KPIs evaluate how potential customers respond to your brand by calculating direct traffic on your product pages and your return on investment (ROI) rates.
Other customer experience KPIs reveal how your brand is perceived and how likely it is to grow by tracking happy customers and measuring the customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and the net promoter score (NPS).
But every one of these customer experience KPIs falls into three distinct customer categories: Attraction, Engagement, and Retention.
Let’s look at each category in more detail.
Customer Attraction
How does a business acquire new customers? A typical customer journey begins with attraction.
To increase sales, you can enhance the desirability of your product by creating memorable CX, offering attractive offers and discounts, and other brand-promotional activities.
As you run any campaign for a scheduled length of time, you’re in the position to measure how successful your consumer attraction effort is, using the following customer experience KPIs:
🔺 Direct traffic
Direct traffic refers to the volume of customers who come to you independently, without a referring source.
In web terms, Google measures direct traffic as users reaching your site via its URL through direct browsing, active searches, or any promotional activity initiated by your brand. Direct traffic is never measured when the customer has reached you from another site redirecting them.
It’s an important metric that lets you track how your brand organically attracts customers. It also allows you to track growth spikes resulting from effective marketing and lead generation campaigns.
🔺 Return on investment
Today, the role of marketing is to listen and interpret the consumer’s voice so your business can deliver a solid customer and product experience to them. Just advertising a product isn’t enough.
The ROI metric measures how well any marketing campaign is doing by tracking the business growth resulting from its effectiveness.
ROI is a good audit of the money you spend on marketing initiatives to grow your business versus the revenue they succeed in generating or the objectives and goals met.
🔺 Pages per visit
The goal of attracting customers to your product pages or site is to keep them interested and engaged for as long as possible so you can nudge them into a conversion that meets your goals. These could be increased sales, deeper customer interaction, loyalty-building exercises, or gathering feedback.
The pages-per-visit KPI tracks how long consumers spend on your website and how many pages they visit during their session.
The more time they spend browsing pages with you, the better indicator it is of the CX you’re providing. It’s also a good measure of how well-designed your site’s navigation is and to what extent visiting customers find your content interesting.
Customer Engagement
As we’ve seen, attraction brings customers to you. But now that you’ve caught their interest, how do you sustain it? That’s where customer engagement comes in.
Customer engagement strategy is the building block of your relationship with customers, aimed at increasing brand awareness and fostering customer loyalty.
Engagement strategies offer a rich field of choice to captivate customers: from targeted website content and social media promotion to scaling customer support, outreach initiatives and marketing campaigns.
To measure how well your engagement efforts are doing, these customer experience KPIs help.
🔻 Acquisition rate
Your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is calculated as the sum of your marketing and sales activities divided by the number of customers you’ve acquired due to your campaigns.
For example, if your total spend for marketing and sales is €150,000 + €100,000 annually, and the same year you acquire 100 new customers, your CAC is €2,500.
Keeping track of your acquisition rate is vital to know the outcome of your expenses towards converting interested onlookers into paying customers and the value of a customer to your company.
The lower your CAC the better it is for your business regarding return on investment and direct profit.
🔺 Conversion rate
The conversion rate metric measures the success of your marketing and sales campaigns by registering the number of purchasing customers. However, converting visiting customers to purchasing ones involves a delicate balance of many elements in your CX — and even the littlest can strongly impact customer conversion rates. For example, the size, shape, colour or position of an action icon on your product page can determine how many customers click on it.
Making changes in your user interface, marketing campaign, sales effort, social media positioning, etc., and then analysing the results gives you a clearer understanding of how to improve your customer conversion rate.
🔻 Abandonment rate
Baynard reports that only three out of every ten virtual customers complete a purchase after adding items to their cart. Furthermore, Gartner estimates that businesses lose close to $18 billion from cart abandonment rates alone.
But this isn’t only because customers are looking to window shop instead of buy.
The reasons for high cart abandonment rates vary from poor checkout experiences and confusing navigation to unnecessary roadblocks in the purchase journey, like poorly designed pop-ups, an insistence upon user registration, or offering limited payment options.
So keep an eye on your cart abandonment rate and look deeper into the issues causing it. It helps implement vital changes in CX to simplify customer journeys and boost your sales.
🔺 Customer Health Score
The customer health score is an important metric that lets you track the status of your relationship with existing customers.
To calculate it, you’ll need to inspect various factors like the length of time a customer has been with your brand, their average spend and any drops in this number, how often they’ve interacted with your service team, and the quality or willingness of their feedback.
Knowing your customer health score helps you classify existing customer relationships as healthy, weak, or critical — that is, at high risk of leaving your brand altogether.
This knowledge is valuable in prompting targeted outreach efforts on your part to improve weak or at-risk customer relations, so they can continue to value and support your brand.
🔺 Customer lifetime value
The customer lifetime value (CLV) metric predicts how much business an existing customer will bring in throughout their lifetime with your brand.
Customers define the existence, purpose and evolution of your business. They are its lifeblood. So fulfilling customer expectations and extending your mutual relationship is vital for success.
CLV tells you how much an existing customer is worth to your business.
Measuring it in tandem with customer health helps you understand the value of your current customers, so you can strategize and focus your outreach and marketing efforts to keep them engaged and loyal.
Customer Retention
Customer retention is the battleground on which all your previous work attracting customers and nurturing relationships through loyalty-building initiatives and value-added experiences pay off.
Customer retention rate refers to the ratio of customers returning to purchase again with your company.
Any business, regardless of size, needs to know how successful its customer attraction initiatives are, to what extent its product and service have satisfied customers, and where it needs to improve.
And the customer journey doesn’t end there. You’ve got to work on keeping your audience loyal and expand your family of satisfied customers to continually boost growth.
Remember, repeat customers are very profitable for your business compared to the cost of converting new ones, so maintaining a healthy CLV goes a long way in raising your bottom line.
Attention to customer retention rates helps you increase recurring revenue, consumer satisfaction, positive referrals and reviews, and grow your business. These KPIs show you how to measure it.
🔻 Churn Rate
Churn rate—also known as customer churn rate or rate of attraction—is one of today’s most critical customer experience KPIs. This metric calculates the percentage of lost customers from the total your business acquired within a set period.
Lost customers could cancel their subscription with you, not return to purchase again, or even unfollow you on social media.
Churn per cent is calculated by dividing lost customers by the total number of customers. The lower your churn rate, the better, as it means you’re likely satisfying customers and delivering a solid experience to keep them coming back.
The best way to control your churn rate is by monitoring your CX and being attentive to customer feedback to proactively address any detractors that get in the way of your CLV.
🔺 Net Promoter Score
The net promoter score (NPS) is a commonly used CX metric to check how well your brand is perceived and received in the consumer market. In a typical NPS score survey, individual consumers rate their likelihood of recommending your brand to others.
Low-scoring customers are considered detractors, median-scoring customers are passive, and high scorers are your brand promoters.
NPS is calculated by subtracting the detractors from the promoters.
By asking the right questions in follow-up surveys, you can use NPS to gain insights into customer pain points, set benchmarks based on consumer trends, and optimise your service experience to meet customer expectations.
🔻 Customer Effort Score
The customer effort score (CES) is a measure of how easy or difficult it is for customers to access the goods and services your brand offers. It also encompasses how well-designed your CX is — from customers having to fill out a form to finding a product or resolving a technical difficulty.
After all, the least effort customers need to execute the required actions, the better.
CES points you in the right direction to improve your overall CX by showing you where and how you can make things easier for customers.
To add more value to CES scores, use web analytics to measure how long customers spend on a support page and the time taken to report an issue. They can additionally measure the effort involved in using self-help solutions like DIY pages or chatbots, how long your support team takes to resolve customer issues, etc.
🔺 Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is measured through automated surveys sent via email or message after any customer interaction. In these surveys, customers usually rate their satisfaction with your service or product on a scale ranging from ‘very satisfied’ to ‘very dissatisfied.’
The CSAT score is effective in helping you monitor how well you’re doing and where you can improve your CX using quick, real-time customer feedback.
CSAT is a great way to plug any holes in your service experience, fix your product according to customer expectations, and reduce friction in your customer experience management strategy.
🔺 First Contact Resolution
First contact resolution (FCR) is one of the most popular metrics in customer service today. It evaluates your customer support effort’s effectiveness by tracking the percentage of customers whose issues get resolved within first contact with your brand.
FCR matters to customers as time is a precious commodity. No customer wants to be left waiting on a call back for a solution to a problem they shouldn’t be having in the first place.
A high FCR rate is a good sign for your support endeavour as it means your business is efficient at solving customer issues the first time around.
Customer experience KPIs are a scorecard
In your drive to elevate your CX and convert more customers, data driven strategies can help you get on the winning side of your goals and objectives.
Making sure your KPIs graph upward gives you the confidence that your business is on the right path to growth and expansion while supporting the interests of your key stakeholders.
But remember, no CX metric should be viewed in isolation. KPIs merely indicate where you need further investigation into the ‘whys’ of any downward trajectory.
Most CX metrics are aimed at helping you understand the success or failure of your goals and objectives, they are not the end goal themselves.
By strategizing and implementing changes based on customer feedback, web analytics, and performance data, you can use customer experience KPIs to correct unwelcome trends.
Interested in learning what a remote customer service solution can do to improve your CX KPIs in the age of the digital customer?
Book a free demo with us at Cocoroco.
Our platform has over 20,000+ customer support agents from across the globe, pre-vetted, language-skilled, and qualified to help you deliver great CX by meeting your customer support needs on a remote and ready-to-hire basis.
Cocoroco works for you.
