Confused by the abundance of potential CX metrics and KPIs? In this article, we explode three Customer Experience metrics myths—and reveal three truths that you need to know to get the most from your customer data.
If you want to improve your customer experience—and your business—you need clarity. Choosing and tracking customer experience metrics and KPIs can give you that clarity, but only if you gather the right info and choose the right things to track.
Let’s dive into three things you must know about metrics before you can use them to successfully guide your customer experience journey. But first, we’ll tackle three metrics myths that can slow your progress down.
3 Myths About Customer Experience Metrics
First, let’s debunk three common—but extremely limiting—ideas around Customer Experience metrics. These might seem like sensible shortcuts when time or money is tight, but they can make it very difficult to get a complete and accurate understanding of your customer experience. In no particular order, we have the myths that:
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1. We only need quantifiable metrics (OR We only need qualitative metrics). Quantitative metrics give us hard numbers, like time to open or shopping cart abandonment rates. Qualitative metrics focus on the user experience and tell us how the time to open affects the customer journey or why customers are abandoning their carts. Fun fact: You need both types of data to understand the customer experience.
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2. On a tight budget, use your intuition. So you’ve been in business 20 years and you know your audience? Great! Use your knowledge to interpret your metrics and add context to what they tell you. But don’t assume you know the customer experience from A to Z; you don’t. You just know a slice of it, and your perception is colored by your expertise. Do your business a favor and get the whole story.
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3. On a tight timeline, ask AI. AI is in its intern era; it makes mistakes and needs you to check everything it does. It can be tempting to ask AI to analyze your customer journey on auto-pilot or do your data analysis. But don’t. It’s not ready for that yet. You’ll spend just as much time fixing AI’s mistakes (assuming you catch them before they skew your results) as you would doing it yourself. A better idea: Do the analysis, then ask AI to draft an email that summarizes key points. And then check it!
There are ways to speed up your Customer Experience metrics process—but these aren’t it. Instead of sacrificing quality for speed, look for ways you can streamline and automate the gathering and initial analysis of your metrics. And remember: it’s better to do one thing well then do 5 or 6 things badly. Start small, focus your efforts on getting it right, and then move on to the next metric or KPI.
The Biggest Myth About CX Metrics and KPIs
There is a rather large elephant in the metric analysis room, so let’s deal with that right now. It’s the biggest myth around Customer Experience metrics, and it’s this:
You only need customer service or customer experience KPIs to measure your CX performance.
No. Just no. For a complete picture of the customer’s journey, you need more than just CX or CS metrics. The customer experience touches more than just your business’ front lines; it ultimately affects every decision you make. If you remember just one thing, remember this: metrics that tell the story of your customer experience are found in many other departments. Think sales, business process, and employee experience metrics. The customer experience is the sum total of your customers’ interactions and feelings; Customer Experience metrics are the total of multiple departments’ collective data.
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3 Must-Know Facts About CX Metrics
Now that we’ve cleared away the rubbish, let’s talk about what you need to know to use Customer Experience metrics profitably.
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1. Flip the script on CX metrics and KPIs. “Start where you are” is usually good advice. But for CX metrics, we recommend starting where you’d like to be. Set a goal, determine how to get there, and track the metric(s) that delivers that information.
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2. It’s more than just what you’re measuring. It’s also about when you collect data and the length of your feedback cycle. As a general rule, data gathered closer to the event and with a shorter cycle is more actionable and accurate.
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3. In analysis, too many is too much. As you explore different business areas, you’re going to find loads of interesting data. But you don’t need to track all of it. Set a goal and pick a couple of metrics that relate directly to that. Track those, and leave the rest for another time. Otherwise, you risk overextending and muddying your analysis.
A further word on flipping your Customer Experience metrics script. That can seem like a big order, but we’ve found that asking the right questions can bring clarity and focus to choosing the right CX metrics. Asking these three questions will help you understand where and how to start:
1. Where do we want to be?
2. What will get us there?
3. What detail do we need to change to get there?
What you’re doing here is breaking the CX metrics and KPI analysis process into smaller steps. As we said earlier: choose one thing to work, do it well, and repeat the process. In CX, change often happens incrementally, but those details add up to a significant improvement.
Get Our Free Guide to Customer Experience Metrics
We’ve spent years in the CX industry, and if there’s one thing we know and love, it’s a well-chosen CX metric. But making that choice can be hard. So we’ve distilled our decades of customer experience (and several blog posts) into this free downloadable whitepaper, 6 Essential Types of CX Metrics.
In this whitepaper, you’ll learn what CX, sales, business process, usability, customer service, and employee experience data can tell you about the customer experience. We’ll also explain more about what metrics really are and why they matter—regardless of how established your business is. And as a bonus, we’ve included our top 10 pro tips for working with metrics. Download your guide today.
