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Let’s face it: No two customers are the same. Some are more patient during their customer journey, while others are not. Some see their relationship with you as purely transactional, while others want to advocate wholeheartedly for your brand. Your challenge? Providing a CX that delivers to all of your customers, whether they are your biggest fans — or not.
Tracking the customer experience (CX) is often elusive. But with metrics like key performance indicators (KPIs), you can develop a clearer picture of CX that can help you enhance customer satisfaction, build loyalty and drive business success.
In this post, we’ll examine the most popular customer experience KPIs and discuss strategies for supplementing these metrics with other data to move your CX program forward.
We could list a lot of KPIs here. But we’re going to focus on nine key KPIs that we think are especially valuable for measuring the success of a CX program.
A CSAT Score measures customer satisfaction with a product or service. CSAT is based on responses ranked 1 to 5 (1 = very dissatisfied, 5 = very satisfied) to the question, “How satisfied were you with … ?” You can pose this question to your customers in quick surveys after phone interactions or in online feedback forms.
To calculate a CSAT, divide the number of customers responding “4” or “5” by the total number of responses. So, if 111 out of 146 customers said “4” or “5” in response, your CSAT score is 76.0%. (By the way, if you’re a health insurer, that score is right on the money with the rest of your sector, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index.)
CSAT measures satisfaction with a single event or interaction. To make CSAT more broadly relevant, supplement it with other data insights. For example, breakthroughs in AI models can track and analyze caller sentiment in phone conversations to confirm if callers are satisfied before they even take a survey.
Net Promoter Score was developed by Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company in 2003 to measure customer advocacy and loyalty. The basis of this score is the answer to another survey or follow-up question: “On a scale of 0 to 10 (0 = highly unlikely, 10 = extremely likely), how likely would you be to refer our product or service to a friend?”
Respondents are:
NPS, as an equation, is simply promoters minus detractors. The score itself can be benchmarked against peers and within industries. (A good NPS in the healthcare industry, for instance, is 46.)
Even Bain will admit NPS is just a score, but you can use it as the basis for gauging deeper insights into how your customers perceive you and identify areas for improvement.
FCR is the brass-ring aim of customer service: resolving a caller’s issue on one call. You can present this KPI as a percentage of all calls. So, if a call center receives 4,894 calls in a day and 3,296 calls are considered resolved, the FCR rate would be 67.3%. (That’s a little on the low side for an efficient call center, by the way.)
There are simple strategies to enhance first call resolution. The first is good training. Preparing your agents in the contact center to handle callers’ issues efficiently and arming them to resolve issues confidently sets them up for success.
Another strategy is to route calls to the most suitable, available agent. You can achieve this using intelligent call routing. Intelligent call routing seamlessly transfers customers from an online journey to an offline one by connecting their phone calls to the right agent to handle the query. Agents get a snapshot of the caller’s details, such as their name and prior digital activity, to speed up the resolution of the call.
Customer Effort Score was developed in 2010 by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB, now Gartner) to gauge how easily customers interact with your business. The score is based on how strongly a customer agrees with a statement like: “Your company made it easy to handle my question or inquiry.”
Customers respond on a scale of 1 to 7 (1 = extremely disagree, 7 = strongly agree). Scores above 5 are presented as a percentage. If 78 respondents score 5 and above out of 122, the CES score is 63.9%.
CEB research shows that 96% of customers who have difficulty interacting with a company — such as being frequently transferred or asked to repeat information when contacting a call center — will be disloyal. Less than 10% of customers who have easy interactions are likely to desert a brand. So, it’s worthwhile to reduce customer effort and elevate CX.
Identifying and correcting “friction points” in the customer journey is one way to improve CES. You can do this by tracking a customer’s online-to-offline journey with a platform like Invoca. Invoca shows you when customers abandon your online buying flow to place a phone call instead. This often occurs at friction points — for example, a webpage may not provide all the information the customer needs to make a purchase, or there may be an issue with the online shopping cart. Invoca helps teams identify these CX issues, so they can correct them before they lead to lost customers.
Customer Lifetime Value is the total dollar amount you can expect a customer to spend. You can use both actual transaction data and predictive analytics to calculate CLV.
So, for example, if a loyal 52-year-old customer of a Toyota dealership has purchased two new Corollas since age 40, spending an average of $27,000 per purchase, and data shows that they are likely to keep this purchasing pattern until age 64, the customer’s CLV is $108,000. Once you know the CLV figure, you can manage Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) by making sure that you aren’t overspending.
Elevating CX, ensuring customer satisfaction, and making customers feel valued all help to maximize CLV. Personalization is one surefire way to make customers feel like VIPs, but you need to know as much as possible about your customer and their journey in order to do it well. Tools like Invoca’s PreSense can help. It collects data from a customer’s pre-call journey so customer service agents can deliver personal greetings and enter calls equipped with vital insights about why a caller is reaching out.
Studies disagree on exact numbers, but a general rule of thumb is that it costs five times as much to bring in a new customer as it does to retain one. A high CRR not only ensures continuity for the business, it also reduces costs.
CRR measures the percentage of customers a business retains. You can measure weekly, monthly, annually, or for a specific period. To calculate, count customers at the beginning of the period and subtract the number of customers at the end of the period. Don’t include new customers. If you had 100 customers at the start of the month and 91 at the end of the month, your CRR would be 91%.
CRR helps you gain insight into which customers are more likely to churn, and why, as well as what you’re doing right to retain customers. You can boost customer retention efforts through increased personalization of customer interactions to make them feel valued and by using tools like conversation analytics data to highlight pain points and at-risk customers.
Customer churn is the antithesis of customer retention. Maintaining a low Customer Churn Rate, or the rate at which you lose customers over time, is essential to reducing CAC. CCR is another metric that you can measure weekly, monthly, annually, or for a specific period.
CCR is also known as attrition, and many factors can contribute to it. Customers may simply move on to what they perceive as a better product, or they may be dissatisfied with the service they have received. There is also seasonal attrition. For example, customers of lawn care businesses in cooler climates may only use a service for six or seven months out of the year. Whatever the cause, reducing churn reduces costs and increases revenue.
One of the best ways to reduce your CCR KPI is to maintain customer satisfaction. This means always listening closely to the voice of the customer (VoC). You can do this by leaning on data from conversation analytics to detect early signs of dissatisfaction. If the data indicates that you are receiving many calls related to glitches in a new product release, for example, you can be proactive about letting customers know you are aware of the issues and working to fix them.
Average Resolution Time is an important KPI for call centers, but also a tricky one. On the one hand, you want to help customers resolve their issues as quickly as possible. On the other hand, training or incentivizing agents to meet quotas could lead to rushed calls and customers feeling undervalued.
ART is calculated by dividing the total amount of time taken to resolve customer issues by the total number of customer cases. So, if your call center spends 600 hours a week (36,000 minutes) to resolve 6,696 cases or tickets, the ART is 5.3 minutes. That’s an acceptable ART. However, you would ideally look to get that number under 5 minutes.
If you are using an online-to-offline tool like PreSense from Invoca, you can trim ART by intelligently routing calls and minimizing callers being transferred. You can also help agents cut to the chase by giving them insights into why customers might be calling based on their prior online journey.
In building a positive customer experience, it’s important to access the true VoC. You can achieve this by asking for direct customer feedback through questionnaires, surveys, and reviews. You can also count feedback from other question-based KPIs like CSAT and NPS since they come directly from customers.
Another way to build up a meaningful picture is to use sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis can be retrieved from what customers are saying about you online and in social media posts. It can also be delivered at scale using sentiment analysis tools like Invoca’s Signal AI.
Signal AI digs deeper into phone conversations by using new neural networks to gauge tone and sentiment on both sides of a dialogue. This analysis is so granular that it detects shifts in sentiment in the conversation. This allows immediate correction by the agent and a better customer experience. It also allows managers to provide more targeted and timely coaching.
For example, if an agent was curt with a customer, and that customer then became angry and hung up the phone, the AI could pinpoint the moment when the conversation took a turn for the worse. In their review of data after the call, the agent’s manager finds that the customer was meandering in their description of their problem, which frustrated the agent. But they also learn that the agent did not manage the call effectively, and work to get more specifics from the caller.
With that insight, the call center manager can then provide the agent with tailored training that will help them do a better job of guiding customers through more efficient, focused, and positive discussions that get to the heart of their issues faster.
It’s impossible to provide a stellar customer experience without KPIs. After all, if you don’t measure anything, how can you know what you’re doing right or wrong? KPIs can help you improve your efforts to drive up customer satisfaction, inspire customer loyalty, and much more.
Invoca’s advanced analytics and AI-powered tools provide critical insights and actionable data that you can use to optimize customer experience KPIs, like CSAT scores, NPS, and CLV, and enhance your customer experience strategy.
For example, Invoca smoothes CX by seamlessly connecting online and offline journeys using intelligent call routing to direct calls to the right agent based on a customer’s online activity. Then, PreSense provides the agent with details such as the caller’s name and likely reason for calling, so each call can be personalized without the need for the caller to provide basic details.
Invoca uses AI to tap into the gold mine of information that phone calls with your customers can yield. That includes surfacing trends in sentiment analysis in that you can use to identify and address customer pain points and train agents to deliver an exemplary CX.
To learn more about customer success metrics and KPIs and how Invoca can help you meet your customer experience goals, see these additional resources:
You can also schedule a customized demo today to learn firsthand how you can boost your CX KPIs with Invoca.
