How to Measure and Improve Customer Experience Today (7 Ways)

I'm just going to assume you've already read our article on what customer experience actually is, and ready to take action.

Improving your CX today will have significant effects to your business, some of which I'd like to mention are:

• Better brand loyalty and customer retention.
• Higher revenue from repeat sales, a willingness to spend more on a worthy brand, and word-of-mouth advertising.
• Brand differentiation based on delivering a positive customer experience.
• Increased customer lifetime value when customers are emotionally attached to a brand or product.

And since you can't improve what you can't measure, improving CX starts with keeping close track of a bunch of metrics:

How to measure Customer Experience Performance

You can't directly measure customer experience, since it is a qualitative variable. However, there are metrics that indicate the quality of a CX.

Here are a few that you should start with:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This is a measure of how likely someone is to recommend your product or service to someone else.

Scores can indicate detractors, passive consumers, or promoters, based on whether the customer in question scored low (between 0 and 5), in the middle (between 6 and 8), or high (scored 9 or 10) on a product/service recommendation scale between 0 and 10.

The majority of businesses across the globe use NPS as their primary customer satisfaction indicator, you can use NPS software to start calculating your NPS today.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction scores are the scores you receive from customer experience surveys asking your customers to rate their satisfaction or experience on a sliding scale.

The answers are usually interpreted as having customers who are highly satisfied, indifferent, or highly dissatisfied with you, your products, or your services, similar to the detractor/passive/promoter classification used with the NPS.

Customer Experience Analytics

Since customer experiences cover the entire customer journey, you can use many different indicators to see how well you are doing in different parts of the journey.

Here are 5 examples of such indicators:

1. Churn rates measure how many customers you lose during a specific period based on the customers you have after a certain period and the customers you had at the start of that period. 
2. Customer effort scores (CES) measure the burden on the customer in handling a certain interaction, such as using an app or completing an order.
3. Average resolution times are used to measure the amount of time it takes a customer to resolve an issue. Longer resolution times can lead to higher customer drop-off or churn rates.
4. The First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR) is a measure of the number of customers who have their issues or questions resolved in the very first attempt. Better effort scores (CES) can improve the FCR, but remember that having no customer come to you for assistance via highly intuitive onboarding and pre-sales education, instructions, and product design should not be overlooked.
5. Goal completion rates (GCR) are used to measure the number of people who complete a specific marketing goal. For example, signing up for a newsletter, clicking a link, or sharing a social post can be included in GCR calculations.

And here is how all of the above comes together:

• The NPS is used to determine if a user would recommend your product, and a matching customer statement might be, “You should try this product!” This can be thought of as the peak of the digital customer experience journey.
• A high NPS, however, can only be achieved if your product is enjoyable to use, which you can measure using a high CSAT, which will lead customers to say that they had a great experience using your product.
• One step lower than this is the ease of use, measured by CES.
• The lowest step is goal completion – measured by GCR – to determine if users will be likely to say that yes, they were able to achieve their desired outcomes using your product or service.

When looked at this way, customer service and customer experience are built in stages, starting with ensuring that your product delivers a certain set of features or functions (measured by GCR), is easy to use (measured by CES), is enjoyable to use (measured by CSAT), and has made promoters out of your users (measured by NPS).

7 Tips to Improve Customer Experience

It is important to understand that customer service is not customer-focused.

Rather, it is company-focused. It requires an examination of every customer interaction with your company. 

A good customer experience is anything that keeps your customers coming back for more while also sharing positive reviews about their experiences with you. There are many things you can do to make this happen, including empowering employees to deliver excellent service all the time, giving them the training they need to perform their jobs well, and knowing what you do well versus what needs to be improved so that you can focus on those areas.

Here are a few examples of how to create great customer experiences:

#1 Plan Experiences from Beginning to End

Although there are examples of unplanned greatness all around us, they're just exceptions; thanks to Ocean's 12 for teaching me that.

Thinking of every detail and possibility, and including them in a plan that outlines Customer Experience is the first step. This way, every member of your business knows what they're supposed to do and when they're supposed to do it; while you will avoid any surprises that can distort your path to success.

#2 Be Friendly and Empathetic

The tone matters.

Throughout the customer experience, you need to keep conversational proximity with your user; meaning that any given interaction they've got with your product should be in a friendly manner. They should feel valued and cared for.

#3 Provide Unquestionable Value

You are supposed to provide a value, so do it.

It's simple, you've promised a value to your customer and delivering on your promises is the only way of creating satisfaction among customers. Whatever they're hoping to solve with your product, as long as it's not totally unrelated (e.g. using a toothbrush to cut paper), you must provide.

#4 Offer the Perfect Customer Onboarding

"A poor onboarding experience is hard to come back from and is the fastest way to lose a customer. It's critical to actively think about the entire customer journey".

Paul Philp

The best customer experiences have an outstanding customer onboarding process that meets every need of users, and the customer onboarding is what makes these CX instances great.

It is where the customer is introduced to your product and services, and the business altogether. It is where the bases of your relationship are established.

You must start paying attention to what you offer as your customer onboarding, and see if there is anything you can improve. Feel free to devour our definitive guide to Customer Onboarding.

#5 Iteratively Improve

Rome wasn't built in a day.

Improving your CX slowly while making sure of the efficiency of your previous changes is not going to make you rich overnight, but it is safe for sure.

It shouldn't be a problem as long as you see improvements in metrics.

#6 Be Consistent

Again, Rome wasn't built in a day.

But I'm sure they were laying bricks everyday, starting Day 1.

This is how you're supposed to be with your CX, pushing consistent changes and adopting to different circumstances (e.g. global events, local cultures) is a necessity.

#7 Make Use of Technology

And again, Rome wasn't built in a day.

But with today's technological advancements in construction industry, I'm like why not? :)

Why shouldn't you use technology to your advantage in improving CX?

I'll go with a few examples:

• You can use Obviously.ai to make use of AI-powered data predictions on customer behavior,
• Create and integrate the best onboarding experiences with UserGuiding, without coding.
• Manage and automate customer relationships with Hubspot.

Conclusion

Improving customer experience is all about making sure that you're tracking the right metrics and pushing the changes that'll improve users' lives.

The results will be worth the effort without a doubt, as long as you work in the right direction.