How To Measure Customer Experience

Having got to grips with the subject of what is customer experience and why it’s important, its key touchpoints and what a great customer experience looks like in the first part of our exploration into this topic, we will now investigate how to measure customer experience. This is important, because even though we appreciate that many of you will be keen to get started with improving your own customer experience management (CXM), you need to get some measurements in place for evaluating it first, otherwise it will be difficult for you to know whether or not you have improved it further down the line.

At the most basic level the informal feedback you receive directly from your customers will give you some idea about their satisfaction levels and therefore how effective the customer experience is that you’re delivering for them. But for any company that is larger than just a handful of people, collecting feedback in this way quickly becomes hard to control and formalise.

Other methods of measurement range from scrutinising the web analytics data of your customers journey and your customer retention rates of over a specified period of time, to analysing customer support ticket trends to identify where your customer pain points are, so you can work to improve them. Intrinsic to any successful CX program is customer feedback captured at the point of experience and one of the most effective methods to achieve this is using survey software, which in this instance could be used in tandem with the questions from a customer survey.

When combined with information from systems, this will give you a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative data set, enabling you to measure track and improve customer experience and better understand how to pivot and deliver on customers wants, needs and expectations.

Given its importance and influence in nearly all areas of a business, evaluating the service and support that your organisation provides to its customers is a good place to start, as it can give you an essential insight into your customers opinion of how well you’re performing and their service experience.

So, what is customer service experience?

Customer service experience refers to any service experience that a customer has with a brand. This could be anything from their experience with an organisation’s support team or a company’s website as they tried to navigate around it, to the ease with which they were able to order products and even the speed of delivery they received.

The best way to evaluate your customers opinion in this area is through a customer service survey. Distributing one of these surveys can help you to evaluate the quality of your support and highlight any areas where your team is struggling and need to improve, so you can help ensure higher levels of customer satisfaction at every point of contact within your business.

To get a deeper and more detailed understanding about your customers’ perception regarding all their interactions with your brand you could also follow this up with a customer experience survey. Not only does this focus on all their interactions with your brand, from the very first time they discovered you through to their purchase and ongoing experiences; the customer experience survey also helps identify ways in which you can further improve by asking customers what they most like and dislike and would like to receive more of.

We’ve already mentioned how organisations with the best customer experiences typically report having higher customer referral and customer satisfaction rates. Well, they are also likely to experience greater customer loyalty too and there is an effective way of measuring this through the Net Promoter Score® Question, which asks your customers the question: “How likely is it that you would recommend [our company] [our product] [our service] to a friend or colleague?

The idea behind this is that those individuals most satisfied with your product or service would rate you with a high NPS score, meaning that they would be more likely to recommend your company to others. For more information about this including how to calculate Net Promoter Score® and its benefits you might like to visit our Net Promoter Score® Survey page (or use our free NPS calculator to identify your score).

Customer loyalty is also influenced by how simple you make it for people to reach their goals, as well as how enjoyable you make their experience, so it’s also important to be able to measure this too if you’re going to improve your overall customer experience. Thanks to the emergence of the Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) metrics, this is now possible to achieve. You can find out more about this on our Customer Effort Survey and Customer Satisfaction Survey pages

Why you need to develop a customer experience strategy

If you’ve not already got one in place, now is the time to be developing your CX strategy, as with the rise of the experience economy and an ever-growing number of touchpoints, it’s never been more important to have that deeper, more holistic understanding of your customers’ experience.

Given the range of customer surveys ad other tools that are now available, it’s easier than ever to develop your CX strategy. However, if you’re going to gain the greatest value from your efforts you need to ensure that all the systems you’re using are effectively integrated with your survey platform, all your teams are adequately trained about how to deliver a better CX and you’re using a broad range of metrics to contextualise and measure what your customers are experiencing at all points of their journey with you. If you can do all of this, you will be well on your way to delivering the experience that your customers want.