What Is Customer Experience KPI, and How Can Businesses Improve It?

Tracking KPIs for customer experience is important to understand what customers want and what a business can do to satisfy its every user. It can distinguish a business from its competitors and shift the industry. Together with the quality of a product or a service, customer experience can create a real disruption and raise industries to the next level. 

What are the most important customer experience KPIs, how can a business measure them, and what are the best practices to put customer experience metrics to good use? 

What Is Customer Experience?

It is an umbrella term that embraces all interactions a customer may have with a business during their lifetime as a consumer. 

Why Should a Business Measure Customer Experience Metrics? 

Without measuring and analyzing customer experience KPIs, businesses can’t improve their services. It is important to analyze customer experience metrics to stay on top of any industry and maintain competitive advantage through time. 

The Most Important KPIs for Customer Experience Measurement

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the most important CX KPI to measure. It is essentially a health score for a business’ services and support. The more satisfied customers are, the better the service quality is. Customer Satisfaction is one of the best customer experience metrics to see whether users like what they get from a company. 

Moreover, high customer satisfaction indicates that a brand and its support team is going above and beyond and not only satisfies their consumers’ needs, but actually surpasses their every expectation.

Net Promoter Score

72 percent of people will tell 5 other people about their superb customer experience. Users who share information about a brand and are ready to bring their friends and family are considered net promoters. 

With 74 percent of customers considering word of mouth a key influencer on their purchasing decisions, Net Promoter score is one of the most important customer experience metrics any business should look out for. 

Here are the most popular reasons a user can decide to recommend a business to its friends, relatives, and/or colleagues: 

• The quality of their services or products
• Their support is super friendly and professional
• Their hours of operation are convenient
• They have made a name for themselves in the market
• Their style of communication and values

A business needs to observe all the above-mentioned points for its Net Promoter Score to remain consistently high. 

Customer Retention

When the customer comes first, the customer will last — Robert Half.

60 percent of customers choose to come back to a company after they had a positive experience. Users who keep coming back are not only more likely to become brand ambassadors, but they will also generate more revenue, as they tend to spend 67 percent more than first-time buyers. 

Apart from Net Promoter Score, Customer Retention also directly correlates with such customer experience KPIs as Customer Satisfaction, Churn Rate, and Customer Lifetime Value. 

First Time Resolution

Apart from not having to contact a support team at all, first resolution is something all customers want to experience when contacting a business. 

What are the steps a business can take to achieve a good First Resolution Rate and maintain customer experience on a high level? 

• Implement a state of the art CRM system where all customers’ data will be stored, protected, and accessed easily. 
• Develop a knowledge base that will help both a support team and customers of any knowledge level. 
• Set up and streamline a ticket escalation process. 
• Conduct regular QA sessions for all communication channels to make sure a support team can handle the workload. 

The best solution to establish a high level of first time resolutions is to start cooperating with a professional Support as a Service provider that will take care of all customers’ needs and requirements. 

Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart Abandonment Rate is not often considered an important customer experience KPI. It still needs to be considered when improving customer journey. 

What are the most common reasons for users to abandon their cart right in the middle of shopping? They may find the final price too high. The purchasing process may confuse them. There may be no way for them to pay via their preferred payment method. And these are just the tip of an iceberg. 

The best way to ensure users have a smooth customer experience and rarely abandon their cart is to go through the process and see which stages may confuse or even scare them off. Researching the market and making the prices optimal can also help attract more users. 

Social Media and Followers Number 

97 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on social media when it comes to improving customer experience metrics. In turn, 75 percent of users use social media to research brands they want to buy from. Social media has long become one of the core communication channels for users all over the world to not only research brands, but to communicate with them and even register their complaints. 

The number of followers and social media engagement level are now one of the most popular customer experience KPIs every business should track. 

CX KPI: Best Practices of Improvement

Develop a Customer Persona

To improve customer experience metrics and deliver the best services, a business needs to have a full understanding of who their customers are. 

To properly develop a customer persona, a marketing team needs to find answers to the following questions: 

• What is customers’ median age? 
• Who is the brand targeting more — women or men? 
• What countries does the majority of customers come from? 
• What channels of communication do customers prefer to connect and communicate with a brand with? 
• Why do customers choose to deal with a specific brand in the first place? 

Among others, these questions can help any business gain an understanding of its users, their needs, and likes. 

Developing a customer persona and tailoring services precisely to a customer base’s needs is the first step towards a top-notch customer experience.  

Track All Possible Customer Experience KPIs

Just like with a well-oiled machine, a business needs to check all its systems to ensure everything runs smoothly. Nothing should be left out of a regular analysis and no detail, dip, or increase should be deemed too minor, as every change can indicate issues on any of the customer experience stages. 

The best way to set up a tracking system is to develop an AI-powered CRM system where a customer support and service team can gather all data about customer experience and service. In turn, AI can analyze the pattern, count the formulas, and give out all the data needed by a company to improve its customer journey, resolution rate, and satisfaction score. 

Use Heatmaps and Cart Abandonment Rate to Spot Bottlenecks

A heatmap is a two-dimensional data representation where values are visualized by colors.

Any service has bottlenecks unless it’s thoroughly analyzed and constantly improved. And there are two ways to approach the improvement of customer experience. The first one is to use heatmaps. They are one of the best ways to receive deep insights into customer behavior. They can locate areas that need to be improved. Property analyzed heatmaps can help optimize web pages design and, ultimately, improve conversion rates. 

The second way is to analyze Cart Abandonment Rate. As was said before, a deep analysis of the Cart Abandonment Rate can help businesses spot the weakest points of the purchasing process.

By combining heatmaps and Cart Abandonment Rate analysis, a company can gain a full understanding of bottlenecks in its customer journey pre-, mid- and post-purchase. 

Always Collect and Analyze Customer Feedback

42 percent of businesses do not listen to or act on their customers’ feedback. That means almost half of the global market can have difficulties improving their customer experience because they simply do not know what their users want and why they may churn in the future. 

Customer feedback is not something businesses can disregard if they are looking to improve their customer experience. The ground rule here is to collect every bit of feedback about a product or a service, be it the results of surveys, users’ feedback on social media or platforms like App Store and Play Market. The entire scope of feedback needs to be accumulated in one place and carefully analyzed to make sure every customer knows they have a voice and their opinion matters. 

The more a business is prepared to listen to its customers, the more likely it is to rapidly grow its customer base and revenue. 

Examples of the Best Customer Experience 

Starbucks

Starbucks’ app is one of most famous examples of top-notch customer experience. It allows users to buy and pay for their beverages online. This way they do not have to wait in lines and waste their time. The app also allows them to accumulate points and participate in the reward system. 

The Starbucks team also uses the app to gather feedback and implement the changes into their menu or services. The chain has also partnered with Amazon to implement the possibility to order coffee via Alexa — an AI-powered voice assistant. With 72 percent of people having used a voice assistant in the past 6 months, this solution allows Starbucks to show they are following all the trends and can provide a seamless and modern digital customer experience. 

Uber

The best example of Uber’s customer experience and customer-centric approach is their mobile app. Via it, the stakeholders (drivers and passengers) have the opportunity to connect in a matter of seconds. The system works almost flawlessly, which allows Uber to service 131 million people in 72 countries. 

Microsoft

Despite being a SaaS company, Microsoft decided to bid on social media. With the rise of social media platforms, Microsoft has established a strong presence on Twitter and Facebook. With their help, the company not only informs its users about the changes and updates in its services and products. It also uses the power of social media to the fullest, allowing its customers to communicate with their support and service teams and get answers regarding any aspect of the business via DMs. 

With the number of customers who prefer social media to any other type of communication jumping by 110 percent in 2021 alone, Microsoft has clearly made the right bet when it comes to customer experience. 

McDonald’s

When it comes to in-venue service, not a lot of businesses can compete with the changes McDonald’s has implemented. The introduction of self-service kiosks, table service, better interior design, and improved quality of ingredients has helped the chain improve their annual revenue by 20.9 percent in 2021. 

The best part? These changes were all based not on the marketing research, but on analyzing customer experience metrics. This may be the best example of a company listening to their consumers to dramatically improve their customer experience and increase revenue. 

SupportYourApp and Customer Experience — How Do We Ensure the Quality of Our Services? 

We Listen

When it comes to our clients’ customers’ experience and satisfaction, we are always very careful and attentive. Our support consultants always work with the best software solution that fits every project the best. 

Upon request, our team can ask for users’ feedback and opinions about their customer experience, gather the information, and then present the appropriate solutions to our clients. We can also implement the changes requested by our clients’ customers, test them, and get customer feedback once again. 

The ability to implement active listening and make necessary changes into the products and services is one of the best ways for our team to show we care about all our clients’ customers. 

We Conduct QA

Regular QA is part of our streamlined processes. This allows us to maintain the same level of customer experience and keep our clients in the loop about the moods of their users. 

This allows us to deliver a customer experience of consistent quality and train our team in accordance with the latest trends in customer behavior. The result is us communicating with every customer on their level and in their language (sometimes, quite literally. After all, our team does speak 55 languages). 

We Research the Market

Through our decade in the market, we have learned — deep and consistent research can go a long way. That is why our entire team always takes time to research the latest trends of tech, e-commerce, crypto, telecommunication, and numerous other markets. We are also in a constant search for an even better approach to customer experience and communication. 

These steps help us to always keep our service relevant and our information up-to-date. They also compliment our QA process perfectly, as we know exactly where to look for possible bottlenecks. 

We Develop

Figuratively and literally — we develop all the time. Our tech team is always updating and perfecting our in-house built, AI-powered CRM system — QCRM, and our team never stops its education process. 

Developing and looking for newer, better, more disruptive solutions is in our DNA. These approaches allow us to improve all CX KPIs and always deliver the best customer support services. 

Want to enhance your customer experience and find an even better approach to customer support? Contact us at [email protected] to learn more about SupportYourApp and our team.

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