What Are CX KPIs?

In a nutshell, customer experience KPIs are trackable metrics you can use to determine:

• How satisfied are customers with your brand and their journeys?
• Are your clients likely to stick with your brand in the long term?
• How effective your site or store is at facilitating conversions (like purchases or subscriptions)?

Think of CX KPIs as windows into the minds and hearts of your target audience members. When you track the right collection of KPIs, you’ll better understand what your customers want and, more importantly, need from your brand.

Surveys are effective, to be certain, but only a small fraction of your buyers or clients will ever fill them out. Furthermore, surveys rely on volunteered responses. They might not always be 100% honest or true — imagine a client who’s deeply dissatisfied with their experience with your brand but doesn’t want to appear rude or mean on a survey.

Bottom line: KPIs for customer experience provide data-based insights into your clients' feelings.

Key Customer Experience KPIs To Measure

Of course, the odds are your brand already tracks certain KPIs for overall business health, profits, and more. If you’re not sure what KPIs you should track to improve CX, start with these.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

First up is the net promoter score. NPS is a crucial metric that tells you how likely a customer or client is to recommend your brand to someone else. For NPS, have your customers or clients rate your brand on a scale from one to ten. Among those clients:

• Those with 9 or 10 scores are “promoters.”
• Those with 7 to 8 scores are “passives.”
• Those with any other score are “detractors.”

Here’s how you calculate NPS with the above scoring system:

1. Determine the percentage of promoters you have among all surveyed customers
2. Then calculate the percentage of detractors
3. Subtract that percentage from the promoter percentage, and presto!

NPS is an effective CX KPI since it tells you how often you can count on your clients to promote your brand for you. It’s essentially free marketing, so a higher NPS is always advantageous.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score is a popular CX metric, usually displayed on a scale from 1 to 5 and then typically converted into a percent). These are the one or five-star ratings seen on platforms like Google or Facebook.

In essence, this KPI tracks just how satisfied a customer is with their experience or your brand's customer support. It's a great tool to measure how effective your CS agents are at providing stellar, supportive experiences to your most important shoppers.

You can measure CSAT in a handful of ways, such as surveys. For example, when you take advantage of Awesome CX’s call center services to handle call overflow, our agents can easily ask a few satisfaction-related questions at the end of each call. Over time, you’ll have enough data to put together a comprehensive, accurate CSAT.

By the way, at Awesome CX, our CSAT score is 96% (compared to the industry average of 88%).

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Then there's the customer effort score. CES is a simple metric that requires customer or client input. Most companies gather CES metrics by asking one question: how easy was it to solve your problem today? Ask your clients this question in a brief, one-question survey at the end of the transaction using a five to seven-point scale.

Then just look at the average score to determine how easy or smooth the average customer’s experience is. That’s an advantageous thing to know since you can apply it to things like:

• Web page design
• Shopping cart experience and ease-of-use
• Customer support interactions (and how easy it is to get a resolution to something like a technical problem)
• And so on

The easier, the better!

Churn Rate

Churn rate is a popular KPI overall, and for a good reason. It's the percentage of customers you "lose" among your entire customer base. A "lost" client or customer is one who doesn't come back for a repeat purchase or has stopped using your services.

Say that you sign 1000 subscribers up to a service. Over the next month, you find that the subscription number has declined to 700. Your churn rate, therefore, is 30%. A higher churn rate means you’re bleeding clients and need to improve your customer experience to compensate ASAP.

Customer Retention Rate

The customer retention rate is the opposite: It tells you the percentage of clients that you keep after an initial purchase or subscription. A higher customer retention rate is ideal since acquiring a brand-new client usually costs more than keeping a current one. If your customer retention rate is high, keep doing whatever you’re doing!

Customer Acquisition Rate

Customer acquisition rate is key for measuring your CX, especially at the beginning of a purchase funnel. You can measure customer acquisition rate by looking at how many conversions (e.g., subscriptions or purchases) you have out of your total site visitors or leads, depending on your business model.

If your customer acquisition rate is high, it likely means your CX is excellent, particularly at the beginning of a purchase funnel. If the opposite is true, you need to make your site easier to use and your landing page more welcome, at a bare minimum.

Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart abandonment rate is a precise CX KPI that tells you one thing: The percentage of clients or customers who abandon their carts after putting something in them.

Say that you have 125 site visitors who put something in their shopping carts over the course of a single day. By the end of the day, only 75 of those customers went through with a purchase. Your cart abandonment rate, therefore, is 40%!

The cart abandonment rate reveals what the checkout experience is for your core audience members. A low cart abandonment rate means it’s easy, quick, and fun to check out. A high cart abandonment rate means you want to go through the checkout process yourself, taking notes all the while so you can make some big changes.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is exactly what it sounds like: a measure of the average amount of money an average customer will spend over their “lifetime” at your brand. For example, if the average client makes three purchases and spends $300, the CLV is $300.

A higher CLV tells you clients are more likely to spend more money on your business so long as your products are relatively affordable. A lower CLV tells you the opposite.

By calculating CLV, you’ll better understand how loyal your target audience members are to your brand. The higher the number, the more money each average buyer spends on your business. Consider calculating CLV and related metrics with the assistance of back-office support services like Awesome CX.

Conversion Rate

You can't forget the classic conversion rate KPI. It's the percentage of site visitors or leads who convert into a customer, subscribers, clients, email recipients, or other types of visitors. Conversion rate is helpful since you can use it to measure visitor engagement along practically any metric, including:

• Survey respondents
• Email subscribers
• Customers
• Long-term clients
• And more

The higher the conversion rate, the better. It’s best to use conversion rate in conjunction with the other KPIs discussed here, as it’s not precise enough to tell you anything specific about your customer experience. But you can combine it with other KPIs to derive major insights.

Average Resolution Time (ART)

Average resolution time tells you the average time it takes for one of your customer support agents to resolve a given issue. Since it's directly correlated with customer satisfaction and team efficiency, it's a good thing to measure whether you're using in-house CS agents or outsourced agents, like the specialists at Awesome CX.

The vast majority of customers want timely responses to their complaints or queries. Therefore, if your average resolution time is somewhat high, double down on training your CS agents so they know what to say, how to fix problems, and how to reassure clients whose issues require a bit more in-depth investigation before being resolved.

Customer Service Satisfaction (CSS)

Customer service satisfaction tells you how satisfied customers are with after-sales service. After-sales service can include:

• Live chats
• CS agent interactions
• Surveys
• Technical support
• And more

This comprehensive KPI, therefore, tells you a lot about the latter half of your target audience members’ experiences. Keep tracking this as time goes on — a high customer service satisfaction rating means customers are more likely to become loyal if they aren’t already.

Customer Health Score (CHS)

Customer health score measures, as an average, whether a given customer will be loyal to your brand as time passes. It generally looks at behavior patterns like:

• Types of products purchased
• Product usage period (i.e., how long a customer uses a product before moving on)
• Number of support team interactions
• Total money spent at your brand

The higher the average CHS is for your company, the better it is overall.

Pages Per Visit (PPV)

Lastly, pages per visit tells you the average number of pages a new site visitor or lead clicks on before clicking away or making a purchase. It’s a strong indicator of whether your site is engaging and easy to navigate through: More pages clicked on usually indicates that your site loads quickly, is visually interesting, and contains a ton of useful information or content.

Awesome CX – A Next-Level Solution To Track CX KPIs

The above CX KPIs are prime tools to help you take the pulse of your customers and their satisfaction overall. It’s a good idea to track at least most of these key performance indicators (if not all of them). If you’re having trouble managing all that work, you don’t have to look far for a solution.

At Awesome CX, we pride ourselves on providing top-tier back-office support services. Whether you need help with administration, data entry, API tracking, or analysis, our knowledgeable, skilled specialists can help you get it all done without forcing you to hire a dedicated department or team of on-payroll experts.

Why not give us a call and see how we can help?

Sources:

Churn Rate: What It Means, Examples, and Calculations | Investopedia

What Is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) | Forbes Advisor

The 20 Best Customer Experience Metrics For Your Business | Forbes

Net Promoter Score - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

Is Acquiring New Customers More Expensive Than Keeping Them? | The European Business Review