5 Key CX Metrics for Steering Your Business

Author: Stephanie Caravajal

Knowledge is power and, in the business world, nothing is more powerful than when an organization has a strong understanding of their customers. Delivering an excellent customer experience (CX) will differentiate your business and help you achieve your goals. By tracking CX metrics, you can gain keen insights into potential strengths and areas for improvement.

Today’s customers expect convenience and personalized experiences, but delivering those individualized experiences isn’t easy. To stay competitive, you need to have a comprehensive view of what can create a truly differentiated, tailored experience in order to open up a whole new world of customer experience (CX). With the right CX metrics, you can get a 360-degree view of your customer and deliver the most unique experiences to the people who interact with your brand. Ultimately, this increases customer satisfaction (CSAT), improves brand advocacy, and drives growth and customer lifetime value.

But this next-level CX doesn’t happen overnight. Below, we’ll share what you need to know if you’re ready to elevate your organization’s CX measurements.

Key Methods for Measuring CX 

The key to improving customer experience is being able to quantify it. While best practices for calculating CX vary depending on the organization’s preference, many organizations use a combination of three methods to analyze their customers’ experiences. These methods are relationship and transactional-based, representing the voice and behavior of the customer, and are established at specific points throughout the customer journey. The three methods are:

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS) discovers how likely customers are to recommend your company which enables you to measure your customers’ long-term happiness and the loyalty of your customers.
2. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) discovers how your customers are feeling at a specific moment which helps measure your customers’ short-term happiness after key interactions with your company.
3. Customer Effort Score (CES) discovers how efficiently you can address customer issues enabling you to measure how easy or difficult it is to do business with your company.

These metrics set a great foundation for establishing a better CX experience, but they’re only the beginning. Once you’ve established them, you’re ready to take the next step in your CX analytics journey.

Maturing Your CX Analytics Journey

When it comes to CX, there’s never a finish line; customers, businesses, and interactions are continuously evolving. Wherever you are on your CX analytics journey, it’s important to do these three things on a regular basis:

1. Evaluate where your organization is on its CX roadmap and where it wants to be. Write down your thoughts in terms of business goals.
2. Ensure that your entire organization is clear on CX priorities. Get buy-in from senior leadership; their support is critical for gaining the resources you need to achieve your goals.
3. Establish listening posts as a means of data collection and an opportunity to gather feedback. Listening posts could be surveys, social media engagement, customer reviews, incident reports, target focus groups, and more.         

Take Your CX Metrics to the Next Level  

When you’re ready to venture beyond traditional CX measures and really amplify your impact, next-level metrics will help you accomplish your CX goals.

Get a better (360-degree) view of who your customers are and how they interact with your company through these metrics:

1. Customer retention/renewal rates are often indicative of the overall customer experience.
   • Insight: Discover how this company improved its customer retention by aligning its overall goals to CX.
2. Advocacy is a direct reflection of your customers’ loyalty and brand perception. Your customer advocacy metric measures how likely your customers are to refer your company to someone else.
   • Insight: Advocacy and NPS aren’t interchangeable. NPS is how likely a customer is to promote your organization. Advocacy is an extension of NPS and provides the company with insights into how often customers are actually promoting the company.
3. Product/service usage provides insight into product/service performance and gives you the ability to measure levels of customer engagement through product/service usage.
4. Digital engagement/adoption is an opportunity to identify which portions of the customer journey that customers would prefer to be digital (self-service) versus traditional interactions.
5. Customer lifetime value (CLV) requires mature customers but equals the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend with your business, or on your products, during their lifetime.

These next-level metrics will help you see the connection between CX outcomes and your company goals, but you need to decide which you’d like to focus on first.

Building the CX Your Customers Want

Prioritizing your list of CX metrics should be based on two key factors: CX maturity and your organization’s goals. If you can determine what you want to accomplish, you can leverage CX metrics to get you there. Whether you’re just beginning your CX analytics journey or you’re ready to begin establishing the next set of CX metrics, contact us.

RevGen Partners is a premier partner for capturing analytics and helping companies become CX-driven. Connect with us today.

Stephanie Caravajal is a manager at RevGen Partners specializing in customer experience. She is passionate about helping organizations create and manage successful CX programs while aligning CX initiatives to digital transformations.

Jeniffer Walsh is the Director of Customer Experience at RevGen. She specializes in CX transformation, digital optimization, and Artificial Intelligence technologies for growth.