Top 7 customer experience metrics to track

You know, at Sprinklr, we live by the mantra — people never forget how you make them feel. 

Honestly speaking, this is all really what it all boils down to. 

And your customers? They remember your brand by the emotions, thoughts and feelings it stirred with every interaction.  

That’s where the elusive concept of customer experience (CX) comes from.  

It's not about logos or slogans — it's about the impression you leave behind. 

But this sounds quite arbitrary, doesn’t it?  

Is there a way to quantify the emotional impact you make? 

Behold the remedy: Choose your ideal customer experience metrics. 

If you're someone who wants to understand the workings of customer experience, you've arrived at the right place.  

In this blog, we'll dig deep into the top CX metrics to track that will help you achieve the holy grail of business success — customer happiness.  

Let’s begin.

What are customer experience metrics? 

Customer experience metrics enable you to gauge how customers truly perceive your brand, how they experience your brand across the entire span of their customer journey. 

For over 70% senior execs, strengthening CX is a top priority. After all, it has a direct impact on your bottom-line. 

But it’s easier said than done.  

Measuring and improving customer experience can be a complicated adventure. 

Why though? 

Because it requires you to decode the nuances and complexities of consumer behavior.  

And also, because “experience” is a partially abstract concept — a culmination of tangible elements, like product functionality and intangible aspects, such as customer service, brand perception and emotional connection. 

That’s where relevant metrics can be handy. 

They help you navigate consumer behavior patterns, so you get a grip on underlying user expectations, preferences, desires and motivations. 

These invaluable insights then empower you to curate customer experiences that not only foster loyalty but also drive customer retention and fuel business growth. 

Key customer experience metrics to measure

Before we list down the metrics, we need to set the foundation right.  

To effectively measure CX performance metrics, you have to understand that customer experiences are layered and highly unique to each user. 

CX is a multifaceted phenomenon.  

To understand what impacts it, you must understand that each metric influences individual aspects of CX. 

We’ll classify these metrics based on three aspects.

• Direct CX metrics
• Long-term metrics
• Service-level metrics

Direct CX Metrics

Direct CX metrics essentially help you gauge the quality of the customer experience itself. They give you an immediate insight into customers’ point of view. As the name suggests, these metrics quantify the abstract aspects that directly influence CX.

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT gives you the scoop on how satisfied customers are with their experience. It tells you if your products, services and support are meeting their expectations or if there's room for improvement.

How can you calculate CSAT?

Simply ask customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5 or through a yes/no question. Keep it simple and get them to disclose information on how they're feeling.

How can you use CSAT to improve CX?

• Spot the weak spots: Dive into those CSAT scores and spot any recurring issues or areas where customers aren't feeling the love. Use that feedback to fix things up, smooth out the wrinkles, and make your CX game strong.
• Support like a champ: Make customer support your secret weapon. Keep an eye on CSAT scores to measure how well your support team is rocking it. Respond quickly, go the extra mile.
• Take action pronto: Don't snooze on feedback! When you see a low CSAT score, jump into action. Reach out to customers, address their concerns and let them know you're all about making things right.
• Keep getting better: Keep an eagle eye on those CSAT scores, looking for patterns and trends. Use that insight to fine-tune your processes, improve customer service training and keep delivering top-notch experiences.

Now, hold onto your hat! There’s something I know you’d love. 

What if you could PREDICT the future when it came to CSAT? 

Go beyond surveys and leverage AI to analyze customer sentiment, intent, emotion and intensity in real-time during the conversation itself — to sketch highly accurate predictive CSAT scores. 

It's like having a crystal ball that foresees customer satisfaction levels, allowing you to proactively intervene, salvage relationships and deliver on-spot experiences. 

Know more, do more: A beginner’s Bible to customer satisfaction

2. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score measures the ease or difficulty customers experience when interacting with your brand. 

It provides insights into the level of effort required from customers to resolve issues, make a purchase or navigate your product. 

How can you calculate CES? 

There are many ways to quantify CES.

A common way is by getting user responses to a simple statement that reads: “[Your company] made it easy for me find my solution.” or “I found it easy to solve my issue.”

You ask customers if they strongly disagree with it or strongly agree with it. 

To quantify CES, you just need to add up all the ratings and divide it with the total number of responses. Here are different ways to measure CES.

How can you use CES to improve CX?

• Enhance self-service options: Almost eight in 10 customers want to resolve things on their own — leverage CES insights to optimize your self-service resources. Beef up your knowledge base, FAQs and online support tools to empower customers to find solutions with minimal effort. Make self-help a piece of cake.
• Optimize customer touchpoints: Use CES feedback to identify touchpoints where customers break a sweat. Simplify those processes, simplify the navigational interface and eliminate unnecessary steps. Keep every touchpoint smooth, seamless and hassle-free.

Go granular: Dissect the nuances of customer effort score

Long-term metrics

Unlocking the value of customer experiences lies in long-term metrics. These powerful indicators allow you to quantify the business value generated by your CX initiatives. By measuring customer loyalty and retention, you can prove the tangible impact of your efforts and drive sustained growth.

1. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score measures a customer’s loyalty and their likelihood to recommend your brand. It reflects the overall sentiment and advocacy potential of your customer base. 

How to calculate NPS?

Calculating NPS involves a simple survey question: "On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" The respondents are categorized into three groups:

• Promoters: who respond with 9 or 10, indicating high likelihood to recommend.
• Passives: who respond with 7 or 8, considered neutral and not factored into the NPS calculation.
• Detractors: who respond with 0 to 6, indicating low likelihood to recommend.

To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. 

How can you use NPS to improve CX?

• Engage with promoters: Create referral programs and incentives to leverage promoters for positive word-of-mouth.
• Address detractors' concerns: Promptly address detractors' issues to convert them into satisfied customers and potential promoters.

2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) indicates the total value a customer brings to your business over their entire relationship with you. It helps you understand the long-term revenue potential of your customer base.

How to calculate CLV?  

CLV can be calculated in different ways, but a common formula is:

(Don’t worry, I’ve spoken about churn rate below.) 

How can you use CLV to improve CX?

• Identify high-value customers: Analyze CLV to identify customers who generate the most revenue for your business. Provide personalized experiences, rewards and exclusive offers to enhance their loyalty and increase their CLV.
• Spot upsell and cross-sell opportunities: Leverage CLV insights to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities with existing customers. Offer relevant products or services that align with their needs, increasing their lifetime value.
• Create a customer loyalty program with tiered benefits: Develop a tiered loyalty program where customers can unlock exclusive perks and rewards as they progress through different tiers based on their purchase frequency or spending levels.
• Offer subscription-based options: Introduce subscription models or membership programs where customers pay a recurring fee to access ongoing benefits or exclusive content. This way, you create a predictable revenue stream and encourage customers to stay connected to your brand.

Good to note: CLV is a comprehensive metric that takes customer churn and customer retention rates indirectly into account. However, if you wish, you can choose to independently measure these metrics. 

Here is the way to do it: 

Customer churn:

Customer retention:

The more you know: Your all-inclusive guide on navigating CLV

Service-level metrics

These metrics dictate the overall efficiency of customer experience.  

While earlier metrics are qualitative, service-level metrics are easily quantifiable. They often correlate to specific processes or touchpoints in the entire realm of CX.

1. First Response Time (FRT)

FRT measures the time it takes for the customer service team to spring into action after a customer first reaches out. 

How to calculate FRT?

Here’s what you can do to keep FRT to a minimum:

• Use canned responses: Curate brand-compliant ready-made responses to help agents quickly respond to regular customer questions/concerns.
• Generate smart responses: Use AI to build answers relevant to a real-time conversation. For example, the new Sprinklr AI+ capability uses revolutionary generative AI to help agents fetch answers on-the-fly.
• Use AI-powered ticket prioritization: Consider categorizing your tickets based on factors such as severity and complexity to ensure you respond to everyone on time without delays.

2. First Contact Resolution (FCR)

First contact resolution helps you gauge your team’s ability to resolve concerns during the first contact, without any need for further interactions. 

Gone are the days of solely measuring first call resolution rates. 

Today, customers utilize multiple channels to find help, sometimes up to five.  

And so, support teams need to be present and helpful on all channels, on any touchpoint — resolving problem at the very first contact, not just call. 

A high FCR shows that your support team is better equipped to drive problems to their solutions in a standalone interaction.  

But to improve your FCR, you need to imbibe a few foundational ideas first.

• Customers not only want a quick solution on the first contact, but they want it to be relevant and effective
• Using multiple, independent, channel-specific support solutions will always result in siloed view of the customer issue
• There is an inherent need to merge data from all touchpoints to get a holistic understanding of the customer – who they are, what they expect, what they want

Check out these four tips to improve your FCR.

Once you have the unified profile of the customer, NO ONE needs multiple attempts to find a solution — neither you, nor your customer.  

No more hoops to jump through — just swift and effective problem-solving. 

Hence, a much higher FCR. 

How to calculate FCR?

3. Average Resolution Time (ART)

As you’d guess, ART is the time it takes for customer support to resolve and close a ticket from the moment it was first raised by a customer. 

To improve your ART, consider using these techniques.

• Fill in knowledge gaps: As a customer, have you ever heard “Please give me some time to find the necessary information” on a call? Your agents should never be in two minds during a live interaction. Invest time in strengthening their product and process expertise.
• Deploy intelligent routing: Use a routing strategy to connect them to the right agent with the relevant experience and expertise. You could use skill-based or sentiment-based routing to waste no time in delivery solutions.
• Foster a knowledge-sharing culture: Encourage your support team to collaborate and share their experience and tips in a centralized hub. Build a stash of scenario-based knowledge solutions and best practices, so you can tackle customer issues faster and smarter.

How to calculate ART?

💡 Sprinklr Tip: Use Agent Assist to surface relevant user information and offer guidance to your teams at every step of the way — in real time.  

Build guided workflows and switch seamlessly between multiple user channels in a Unified Agent Dashboard. Supercharge support agents with everything they would ever need to deliver responses at lightning speeds!

Importance of tracking customer experience metrics

We all know that what gets measured, gets improved. Customer experience performance metrics help you cut through the noise and become the preferred brand for your customers.

1. Identify bottlenecks

CX metrics work like a magnifying glass that uncover the hidden obstacles that frustrate your customers.  

Tracking CX metrics turns you into a savvy detective, solving the mysteries of subpar experiences like reasons for cart drop-offs, dips in CSAT or even defects in internal processes.  

Equipped with this knowledge, you'll fix bottlenecks, smooth out the customer journey and become the hero who saves the day.

2. Improve customer-centricity

Tracking and improving your customer experience metrics gives you a chance to show your customers that you care. 

CX metrics helps you understand their fears, inhibitions and unspoken needs.  

You'll discover their desires and dreams, transforming you into a mind-reading customer advocate. Embracing empathy means you'll always know how to exceed expectations and leave them saying, "They just get me!"

3. Get a competitive edge

Experiences are everything. Tracking these metrics fuels your creative spark, leading to innovative breakthroughs.  

You can channel your inner disruptor, challenge the status quo and surprise your customers with fresh, daring ideas. Knowing your customers inside out will help you carve innovative solutions, leaving your competitors way behind.

How to analyze and implement the right customer experience metrics 

The gravity of analyzing the right customer experience metrics is palpable today. 

However, CX leaders find it challenging to do it effectively. They end up choosing vanity metrics that have little impact on CX.  

Such metrics command high investment and often fail to surface the root cause of unhappiness. 

So, here are a couple of ways to pick and analyze the right CX metrics effectively.

1. Adopt a unified measurement system

Build an integrated measurement system that eliminates the need for multiple, disjointed CX metrics. 

This measurement system must be exhaustive of all and every metric that collectively influence a defining north-star metric. 

Chart out the customer journeys that matter and aspects that drive the experiential and operational performance — all ultimately impacting this one metric.

Source

2. Benchmark against competitors and trailblazers

Many companies get stuck in their own little bubble when it comes to measuring customer experience.  

They obsess over their own metrics and forget to look beyond their own backyard.  

But here's the thing: benchmarking against competitors and leaders should be a priority. 

You see what successful businesses are doing and get inspired — encouraging a shift from optimization to innovation. 

Benchmarking lets you explore new approaches, gain new skills and deliver exceptional customer service that sets you apart in the market.  

It becomes a catalyst for bold thinking and a way to daringly improve CX.

3. Carefully choose your tech stack to track CX

When it comes to choosing an analytical system for CX metrics, don't settle for the basics. 

Look for an analytical powerhouse that collects and analyzes customer feedback in real time —and goes beyond. It should dig deep, diagnose root causes and predict future behaviors. 

Trust a pioneering solution like Sprinklr Analytics that can help you:

• Visualize customer journeys and distil real-time, multi-level insights
• Trust unerring AI-powered sentiment analysis and graph your best CX metrics
• Build hierarchical data dashboards and stay in complete control of your team.

Unearth groundbreaking CX insights with data points across 30+ channels

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