Top 7 Customer Experience KPIs for 2019 and Beyond

What type of customer experience does your business deliver?

Hopefully, a great one. If you’re leaving your buyers unsatisfied and unlikely to choose your brand again, you could be risking your business’s future. Why? A recent study showed that customer experience (CX) will be classed as a bigger brand differentiator than products and pricing by 2020.

Every company has to focus on creating the best customer experience possible to boost satisfaction rates, encourage repeat purchases, generate leads and help reinforce your reputation via positive reviews.

You have to know where your company is meeting expectations and falling short of them. To do this, start measuring powerful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to identify strengths and weaknesses that affect the quality of your CX.

How do you know which metrics to work on?

Take a look at the top seven below.

1. Customer Satisfaction Scores

Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT) are self-explanatory: they measure the level of satisfaction customers feel after dealing with your business.

They should be prompted to rate the quality of their purchase process, customer-support interaction or other aspects of your service with a simple numeric score. As you start to gather CSAT scores from a broad range of customers, you’ll develop an invaluable insight into the level of CX you provide.

Providing feedback should be as convenient and simple as possible for the customer. Ask them to assign their experience a rating as soon as their interaction with your brand ends (be it through email, phone, live chat etc.).

2. Wait Times

Leaving customers on hold too long can have a negative impact on your overall CX: 60 percent of customers feel waiting on hold for one minute is too long, while 63 percent favour a callback option instead.

Track the amount of time customers spend waiting to be connected to a support agent, and how this affects their CSAT score. You may have to take on more employees or implement another support option, such as live chat, that enables agents to assist multiple customers at the same time.

3. Average Interaction Duration

Monitor calls and live chat interactions to identify how long customers have to spend speaking to your employees.

The more interactions your support agents complete, the more customers they can help. It’s that simple.

Agents who spend too long chatting to customers and failing to solve their problems as quickly as they should aren’t as productive as they should be. This is why the average interaction duration is one of the most important KPIs to measure.

Live chat software enables agents to juggle multiple conversations at the same time, improving their productivity and reducing wait times.

4. Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures your customers’ loyalty and their likelihood of recommending your business to friends, relatives or colleagues. Your aim is to leave a powerful impression on them so that they feel inspired to direct others to your products or services.

Track your NPS through customer feedback, such as surveys and polls. Focus on building lasting relationships with buyers and leaving them with no reason to try competitors.

Also, consider implementing an affiliate program into your operations. This is an effective way to involve others in promoting your company, and offers in-depth analytics features that can boost your CX further.

5. First Contact Resolution

In an ideal world, all of your customer service interactions would be completed with first contact resolution (FCR).

This KPI measures how often your support agents are giving customers exactly what they need during calls or live chats. As a result, customers will feel satisfied, confident that your business is worth returning to and have to put in less effort to solve their own problems.

One way to measure FCR is to simply ask customers if their issue was resolved at the end of an interaction. This is more reliable than depending on agents to record their own FCR rates.

6. Customer Effort Score

This KPI measures the amount of effort your customers have to put in before they get the help they need or make a purchase. Customer Effort Scores (CES) highlight where buyers may encounter obstacles in their journey, allowing you to streamline the support or purchase process further.

If customers have to jump through hoops to get the answers or products they’re looking for, they’re less likely to come back again. Focus on keeping all aspects of your service as simple and user-friendly as possible.

7. Cart Abandonment Rate

The average abandonment rate of shopping carts on mobile is 85.6 percent and 73.1 percent for desktop.

You can’t afford to give your customers any reason to walk away from their purchases. If a large segment of your customer base is abandoning their carts, explore their journey through your site to identify potential flaws.

One reason mobile rates outweigh desktop is that many brands still haven’t optimized their sites for smartphones, resulting in clunky checkouts.

To achieve a stronger CX, refine your purchase process to be as fast, simple and intuitive as possible. Don’t assume you can be complacent once you’ve actually brought visitors to your site.

You Can’t Adjust What You Don’t Measure

Each of these KPIs plays a major role in helping you evaluate and improve your customer experience. Track data, pay attention to feedback and treat each consumer with equal importance.

Failing to measure your performance across all areas of your business can leave you unaware of just how unsatisfied your customers may be. The more value you place on enhancing your CX, the better your retention rates are likely to be.