Companies looking to optimize their customer experience efforts can choose from a wide variety of customer experience metrics. This analytical data helps your business dial in on the type of CX that is most appealing to your audience.

Crafting a comprehensive customer experience strategy is crucial to success in the modern business world. Creating appealing, engaging experiences is easier than ever thanks to advances in content management system (CMS) technology that enable marketers to quickly spin up relevant, highly engaging digital experiences without the need to wait for IT help. The newest CMS technology uses “hybrid headless” to combine a versatile development back-end with the use of APIs to rapidly deliver content across multiple platforms.

A best-in-class example of this approach is Crownpeak’s Digital Experience Manager (DXM) which, in addition to the development flexibility of a headless system, also offers non-technical staff the ability to make presentation changes on the front-end as needed. This enables you to act quickly when you gain insights from CX metrics to improve the customer experience by providing content that is closely aligned with what your customers really want.

It should be noted that not all CX metrics are created equal. Finding the ones that are right for your business and that represent the most up-to-date technology is necessary to optimize your website and content.

Below we identify six CX metrics that can be extremely helpful in monitoring and improving the customer experience in 2021.

1. Net promoter score

The net promoter score (NPS) is a frequently used measure of customer satisfaction. Simply put, it tracks the willingness of your customers to recommend your business to others. It provides a broad metric you can use to see how happy your customers are with your company and the products or services it offers.

Start by asking customers to answer a quick survey about how likely they are to recommend your company to a friend on a scale from 0-10, with 10 being “highly likely” and 0 being “not at all likely.”

Tally your results. Customers who answer in the 0-6 range are counted as detractors. Customers in the 7-8 range are considered as passive. Customers who answer in the 9-10 range are considered promoters.

To calculate NPS, simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The resulting percentage is your NPS score.

In the world of digital experiences, marketers can use NPS to quickly identify customer pain points, zero in on drivers in the company that may be creating either promoters or detractors, predict future churn trends, and take rapid steps to meet and exceed customer expectations.

2. CSAT (customer satisfaction)

This metric tracks the average satisfaction score by experience. The score is generally determined via an automated survey asking customers for their rating of a specific experience such as a product purchase, service call, etc. Customers are usually asked to rate their satisfaction on a scale ranging from “very satisfied to “not at all satisfied.”

Because this metric can be calculated very quickly, often within hours or less of a customer’s use of a product or service, it is a valuable way to gather up-to-date feedback.

CSAT can be influenced by brand and product promises made via your digital channels even before a customer engages with you, so it is wise to underpromise and overdeliver to keep customer satisfaction rates high.

Again, agility is key, as companies must continually monitor to identify what’s working well so they can propagate best practice, and areas for improvement, so they can quickly reduce friction across digital channels.

3. Churn rate

The churn rate tracks the rate at which customers cancel their service subscription or stop buying products from your company. This metric is especially useful for companies running a recurring business model such as SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) firms which charge customers a monthly fee. Calculate the churn rate by subtracting the number of customers at the end of the timeframe in question from the number of customers at the beginning of the timeframe in question. Then, divide your answer by the number of customers at the beginning of the timeframe in question.

Paying attention to your churn rate keeps you alert to potential problems in your customer experience strategies. Combining your churn rate metrics with other operational data can help you discern patterns of churn, which will, in turn, help you narrow down where your CX problems may lie.

For SaaS companies, marketers face a significant challenge in reducing churn simply because subscribers to the service already presumably know what the service offers, so typical marketing materials may not move the needle for them.

This is where marketing agility comes into the picture yet again. Marketers in this scenario must create effective communication across multiple channels that directs subscribers to the most popular content and features of the service, and they must do it rapidly and regularly. This strategy is all about staying top of mind for subscribers, delivering value consistently and seamlessly in an omnichannel environment.

4. CES (Customer effort score)

This metric tracks, on a relative basis, the amount of effort needed by a customer to complete a specified interaction. Interactions could include filling in a form on a website, finding a product, or dealing with a technical issue. Customer response is typically gathered via an automated survey which asks a customer to specify the level of effort needed to perform a task.

This metric is helpful for improving the customer experience by highlighting areas where changes can be made to make things easier for customers.

Once those areas are identified, it’s important to act quickly to make changes. Delight customers by providing a smoother digital experience. If a particular area is a pain point for the majority of your customer base, roll out changes rapidly and with fanfare, acknowledging that you are responding to customer feedback to ensure the best possible digital experience with your brand.

5. Conversion rate

The conversion rate calculates the ratio of conversions, or acceptance of an offer or purchase of a product, relative to the number of people who click on a call to action box or view an offer. It helps you evaluate how successful your marketing and presentation efforts are at enticing your audience to sign up for an offer or purchase or express interest in learning more about a product or service.

Conversion rate can be affected by something as minor as the color or placement of a CTA button on a web page. Making quick adjustments and testing the results can help you discover valuable information about what motivates your customers to act. A CMS that allows you to test and iterate at speed enables you to maximize your conversion rates and gain the competitive advantage.

6. Average resolution time

This measure tracks the amount of time needed to come to a final resolution on a customer service issue. It is generally determined by taking the total of ‘times to resolution’ (from start to finish) from all service calls and dividing it by the total number of cases resolved during the time period being analyzed. This metric is a helpful tool for tracking how quickly your company’s staff is able to deal with customer issues. Reducing the time spent solving issues should be a priority for any company, as an improved average resolution time generally maps to improved customer satisfaction.

Crownpeak’s DXM helps optimize the customer experience at speed

Crownpeak's DXM is a headless hybrid digital experience platform that enables your whole team to move rapidly to design and deploy content and to adapt and iterate at market speed. As you generate insights into the customer experience from the CX metrics described above, you can quickly react to them using DXM’s versatile design and delivery capabilities.

Thanks to its decoupled architecture, DXM has the agility and omnichannel flexibility of a headless CMS without sacrificing the full-featured, enterprise-grade content editing tools that are vital to modern marketers.

The system is front-end agnostic, meaning that your team can continue to access your favorite tools and frameworks and seamlessly deliver content to any digital channel you choose using APIs.

To learn more about how Crownpeak's DXM can help you create and rapidly deliver digital experiences at scale, request a demo today.