Experience Measurement and Metrics

By systematically linking customer experience to desired and targeted business results such as retention, revenue or cost efficiencies, CX leaders can consistently and predictably demonstrate how CX improvements directly impact the bottom line.

Even though top-level metrics like NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (Customer Effort Score) and more can be tough for organizations to define and embed, when organizational leaders see how embracing metrics can help them predictably make ROI-driven business decisions, deliver business results and directly impact customer-centric business improvement, they embrace experience measurement.

Done right, experience measurement provides a view across all organizational activities— internal and external—and what to optimize to drive desired behaviors.

Experience measurement is a multi-dimensional capability that helps you quantify the quality of experiences based on metrics related to what your customers perceive or feel about that experience, their behaviors because of those perceptions and feelings, and how those behaviors affect desired business outcomes.

Across your business, you should measure both leading indicators (which link forward to future events and outcomes) and lagging indicators (which look back at what was felt, done, or achieved), with a bias toward more real-time insights. Leading indicators are like looking out your windshield; they are better for hypothesizing what will happen but can be difficult to measure. Lagging indicators are like looking in your rearview mirror, and while easier to measure are hard to change. Both are important.

If you don’t measure the performance of your customers experiences, you won’t know what they do, or more importantly, why they do it. You can’t see where systems and processes are making things harder than they need to be. You can’t know how they feel about their experience or how it changes behaviors like buying more, staying longer, or leaving.

With a nod to management thinker Dr. W. Edwards Deming, you can’t easily manage what you can’t measure. While this seems self-evident, many organizations still don’t do this—even though they have the ability to do so in other areas of the business.

Finance measures things like revenue, costs, and profit. Marketing measures things like awareness, acquisition, and retention. HR and operations manage their business by measuring performance. Experience measurement should be no different.

The right metrics are those that help you measure what’s most important to the organization and to the customer. They’ll help you understand performance, identify gaps, and focus on where to improve, and do so predictably and consistently. Most importantly, the right metrics will allow you, your team, executives, and other business groups to link how customers feel with what they do—and how that drives your business. They are a reminder that your customers have expectations of you too, and you need to understand and track how you are doing against those expectations.