7 customer experience metrics to measure, track, and evaluate

Table of Contents

Customer experience (CX) is the sum of every interaction a customer has with your brand, and is an important indicator of how likely they are to return or recommend you to others. 

This guide shows you how to measure, evaluate, and improve different CX metrics. 

Summary

Customer experience metrics measure how easy, enjoyable, and useful customers find their experience with your business across the entire customer journey. Kick off a successful CX program by tracking these seven key customer experience metrics:

  1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): measures user satisfaction with a product, website, or service by letting users rate their overall satisfaction on a scale of 1-5
  2. Customer effort score (CES): measures the amount of effort a customer has to exert to perform an action, rated on a scale from very difficult to very easy
  3. Net Promoter Score® (NPS®): measures customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others on a scale of 0 to 10
  4. Customer churn and retention rate: measures the percentage of customers who stop subscribing to or buying products from a company, while retention measures a business’s ability to keep its customers over time
  5. First response time (FRT): measures the average time it takes customer support teams to respond to support tickets, customer issues, or requests
  6. Average resolution time (ART): measures the average time it takes a customer success team to successfully resolve each customer support request
  7. Customer lifetime value (CLV or LTV): a revenue metric popular with CX teams that measures the average revenue a customer is expected to bring to your company over time.

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The top 7 customer experience metrics used by experts

1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score is a simple measure of user satisfaction with a product, website, or service. A standard CSAT survey asks, “How satisfied were you with [product/website] today?” on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is very unsatisfied and 5 is very satisfied. 

Measure CSAT by asking customers how satisfied they are at a relevant part of the customer journey, for example on a purchase confirmation page or when a user is logging out.

How to calculate CSAT

Add up the number of 4 and 5 ratings, divide by the number of responses, and multiply by 100.

👉 Set up a CSAT survey in moments with the survey templates in Voice of Customer

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare: add a survey to any website page, and trigger CSAT follow-up questions if customers leave low ratings to find out why they aren’t satisfied. Not sure what to ask? Let our AI assistant generate questions for you. You can also collect CSAT responses from customers at any point in the user journey with our Feedback widget.

2. Customer effort score (CES)

Customer effort score measures the amount of effort a customer has to exert to perform an action (e.g. purchase a product, find information, or resolve a problem). CES is usually rated on a scale of 1 to 5 or 7, from very difficult to very easy. 

Measure CES by asking customers, “How easy was it for you to [insert action here]?” when they complete a key action, for example:

  • After making a purchase
  • After using a service
  • After talking to customer support

You want CES to be as high as possible—a low customer effort score means customers find your website difficult to use or customer support unhelpful. Asking a follow-up question on low CES ratings will help you find out what’s holding customers back and adding friction to their journey.

How to calculate CES

Add all customer effort ratings and divide them by the total number of survey responses to get your average CES.

👉 Set up a CES survey in moments with the survey templates in Voice of Customer

 

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare:  use Session Replays to see how customers navigate your site. Look for rage clicks (rapid, frustration-induced clicks or taps on certain elements), as these customers might be putting in a lot of unnecessary effort to get something done.

3. Net Promoter Score® (NPS®)

Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty and satisfaction metric obtained by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others on a scale of 0 to 10. 

Collect NPS responses by asking the standard NPS question (“On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend us?”) after a customer has received delivery of a purchase or used a service for a reasonable amount of time.

How to calculate NPS

Categorize responses into detractors (0 to 6), passives (7 and 8), and promoters (9 and 10), and subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Or, take a shortcut with Hotjar by Contentsquare’s free NPS calculator.

👉 Use Contentsquare’s NPS Surveys to determine your NPS.

💡 Pro tip: NPS is a useful (and popular) benchmark to help alert you to customer experience problems, but without follow-up questions, you won't be able to fix them.

Ask these follow-up survey questions to find out more:

  • For those who score you 9 and 10 (i.e. your promoters) ask: “We’re thrilled you feel that way. What’s the main reason for your score?”
  • For those who score you 6 or less (i.e. your detractors) ask: “What can we do to improve your experience and your score?”

Ask everyone: “If we could do anything, what could we do to WOW you?”

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare: use our Slack integration and send these responses to a dedicated channel so team members can stay on top of customer sentiment. The responses to these follow-up questions can help you plan your roadmap and make improvements to your product.

4. Customer churn and customer retention rate

Customer churn rate measures the percentage of customers who stop subscribing to or buying products from a company. On the flip side, customer retention is a business’s ability to keep its customers over time. And high churn and low retention rates indicate that something might be wrong with the customer experience, prompting customers to leave. 

How to calculate customer churn and retention

  • For SaaS and subscription businesses: calculate monthly retention by dividing the number of active customers at the end of the month by the number of active customers at the beginning of the month. Your monthly churn is then the inverse of your monthly retention.
  • For ecommerce businesses: calculate retention by using cohort analysis to group customers who made repeat purchases in a chosen time frame.

👉 Set up your own B2B churn survey in moments with the survey templates in Voice of Customer

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare: use Product Analytics to find what turns users into loyal customers and where potential buyers drop off.

Then, use our Impact Quantification tool to tie issues back to conversion rates so you can prioritize changes that will have the biggest impact on retention.

5. First response time (FRT)

First response time is a customer service metric that measures the average time it takes customer support teams to respond to a customer issue or request. FRT can be measured in days or hours, depending on your business.

How to calculate FRT

Add up all first response times and divide the result by the number of customer issues received.

Hiring more customer support staff will likely shorten first response times, but another way to achieve the same outcome is to optimize your website or product to reduce the number of support requests you receive.

6. Average resolution time (ART)

Average resolution time is the average time it takes a customer success team to successfully resolve each customer support request. Like FRT, ART can be measured in days or hours.

How to calculate ART

Add up the total duration of all customer conversations and divide the result by the number of customer chats or tickets. 

Generally, the quicker the ART, the more likely a customer is to be satisfied and have enjoyed a positive experience with your service or product.

7. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is the average revenue a customer is expected to bring to your company over time. 

How to calculate CLV

  • For SaaS companies: CLV is measured by dividing monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by the total number of customer accounts, then dividing the result by user churn rate
  • For ecommerce: CLV is calculated by multiplying the average order value (AOV) by purchase frequency and estimated customer lifespan

CLV might first and foremost be considered a revenue metric, but it also represents customer loyalty and satisfaction. The happier your customers are, the more likely they are to buy from you again or stay subscribed. The result? Increased CLV and business revenue.

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare: use Product Analytics to measure and analyze customer interactions across all touchpoints and campaigns to see how you can increase CLV.

 

Start tracking better CX metrics

Tracking, evaluating, and improving customer experience metrics is essential if you want more satisfied customers.

Want to know how customers really feel about their experience with your brand? Try Contentsquare and start collecting actionable insight, today!

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Request a personalized demo with a digital experience expert!

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Customer experience metric FAQs

  • Customer experience metrics measure how easy, enjoyable, and useful customers find their experience with your business across the entire customer journey.

    • Quantitative CX metrics like CSAT and CES let you track customer sentiment numerically so you can see at a glance when your customers are happy and identify areas for improvement when they’re not
    • Qualitative customer data like survey feedback (e.g. responses from open-ended questions and behavior analytics insights like session replays) provide a more detailed view of what’s happening behind the metrics and help explain why customers are satisfied or not

  • The most popular way to measure customer experience is to use surveys, including:

  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Net Promoter Score® (NPS) are the most popular KPIs used by CX experts to track customer experience.

  • Customer sentiment metrics quantify whether customers have a positive, negative, or neutral opinion of your brand or any part of the customer journey. Some tools use NLP (natural language processing) to classify comments, reviews, or feedback, but it’s simpler to track customer sentiment with standard CX metrics like NPS, CES, and CSAT, and by collecting direct customer feedback and ratings from users.