Here’s how to choose customer experience metrics and measure the performance of CX to optimize interactions across every touchpoint in the customer journey.

While the term customer experience (CX) represents your customers’ holistic view of their experience with your brand, some moments may stand out more than others to them. An engaging storefront or a kind and thoughtful onboarding can smooth over some rougher edges, while slow page load times or a long call queue can turn someone away from a product they’d otherwise love. To measure success at different stages of the customer journey, CX teams need to be intimately familiar with customer journey metrics.

What are customer journey metrics?

Customer journey metrics are a category of metrics CX teams can use to evaluate the customer journey. They can be derived from any source of customer feedback, direct or indirect, and analyzed to reveal areas for improvement. Using these KPIs in your decision-making can help your team enhance the overall customer experience and customer loyalty.

How to choose the right customer journey metrics for your organization

According to Gartner, most large companies keep track of more than 50 CX metrics, with some monitoring as many as 200 KPIs. However, not all of these measures are created equally — choosing the right customer journey metrics requires identifying your organization’s goals and aligning the data you evaluate with the appropriate KPIs.

Customer journey metrics can be used for a variety of organizational goals and needs, including:

• Improving customer loyalty and satisfaction
• Minimizing churn and improving retention
• Enhancing different aspects of the customer journey

Here’s how to outline your customer journey measurement process.

1. Define your customer journey

Outline the stages of your customer journey, or the steps customers take as they engage with your organization and purchase your goods or services. Typically, customer journey stages include:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion
• Post-conversion
• Advocacy

2. Identify all touchpoints

Determine each stage where customers can interact with your brand. This may include your company’s storefronts, websites, apps, texts, emails, contact center, chatbot, social media channels, surveys, and more.

3. Select metrics for each touchpoint

Choose the appropriate metrics to track for each stage to ensure you’re measuring the right experiences at each moment in the journey. Here are some metrics to consider by stage:

• Awareness: Impressions, click-through rates, form experience score, navigation
• Consideration: Time spent on the page, page views, lead generation, focus rate, multiclick behavior, device rotation, reading, bird’s nest behavior
• Conversion: Conversion rates, average order value, average contract value
• Post-conversion: Customer satisfaction, retention rates, customer sentiment
• Advocacy: NPS,® referrals, customer lifetime value, churn

Tip: Use a behavioral intelligence tool and Digital Experience Score for insights into every digital experience and customer interaction at scale.

4. Implement tracking tools and integrate data sources

When you’ve selected the metrics you want to track, take advantage of a customer experience analytics tool like Medallia’s customer experience platform to reliably gather data from various sources and integrate structured and unstructured data from sources like your CRM, social media channels, online reviews, social listening, customer feedback, market research, and market signals into easy-to-read dashboards and reports. 

5. Analyze and segment data

Regularly analyze and segment your data to generate updated insights and identify patterns, trends, and areas for improvement. Consider segmenting data by demographics, product and service lines, and geographic regions. You can even go a layer deeper and look at your data by lifetime value, contract value, and customer loyalty.

6. Compare against benchmarks and consider external factors

Finally, benchmark your CX metrics against industry standards and historical performance. Don’t forget to take into account the impact of economic conditions, market trends, and changes in consumer tastes and behavior. 

Top customer journey metrics in experience management

Although there are many to choose from, we’ve compiled a list of the top metrics that CX teams should track.

Customer experience and engagement metrics

This group of metrics helps identify how customers are reacting to — and how they feel about — your brand throughout their journeys. 

Net Promoter Score® (NPS®)

NPS is a simple yet reliable metric that companies are able to calculate by surveying customers and asking them to rank on an 11-point scale how likely they are to recommend a company or brand. At a glance, it shows how loyal your customers are, but it also helps identify your promoters — and detractors.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

This metric is a measure of how much revenue a customer generates throughout the course of their relationship with your company. CLV gives you insight into how much your customers are spending with you. This can be combined with other metrics to identify customers that could use additional attention from sales or customer success.

Customer Retention Rate

Retention rate indicates how well you’re retaining customers over a given timeframe. Retaining customers means you’re holding onto their lifetime value, contributing to long-term stability and growth. Evaluating your retention rate can reveal when — and why — customers choose to remain with your organization.

Churn Rate

The inverse of the retention rate, churn, is a dreaded word in the world of experience. It indicates the percentage of customers who leave or do not renew their contracts with your organization. Understanding the causes behind churn is crucial to improving customer experience.

User Engagement

This is a measure of how deeply users engage with your websites or apps on a scale of 0 to 10, indicating how much time they spend and how much attention they pay to your digital experiences.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

A simple measure of how much effort a customer expends while interacting with your brand, such as during a purchase or customer service interaction. This can be collected via surveys using the Likert Scale to identify how your customers perceive the process. Less effort typically results in better experiences.

Conversion Rate

An indicator of the success rate of your marketing or sales actions, this metric reflects the percentage of prospects who take a specific action, like signing up for an account, checking out, or becoming a subscriber.

Contact center, customer service, and customer support metrics

On the other end of the customer journey is customer service — the ways in which you’re supporting or delighting customers when they have a problem.

Average First Response Time

This metric describes how quickly, on average, your teams respond to customer inquiries. Using this measurement can help you understand sources of friction in the customer support journey.

Average Resolution Time

This is a success metric for your customer contact centers that assesses their efficiency in closing customer issue tickets. More efficient teams close more tickets faster.

Customer Satisfaction

This metric measures customer sentiment following specific interactions, or as it relates to the brand as a whole. Typically, this data is acquired through surveys and calculated by dividing the number of positive responses by the total number of surveys taken, and multiplied by 100. AI-powered text analytics and speech analytics can also be used to automatically analyze every customer interaction and measure the customer sentiment of these interactions. 

Strategies to improve customer service metrics

Ultimately, the goal of measuring your company’s customer experience is to improve it. Monitoring KPIs like the ones discussed is a great way to generate the insights necessary to identify areas of friction and implement strategies to improve them. 

With the right metrics in place, you’ll be able to:

Identify and alleviate pain points

Identify KPIs that are behind benchmarks and dig into the root cause. For example, if customer feedback suggests service centers are unsatisfactory, look to things like response and resolution times to identify areas for improvement. Similarly, if contract values are high but so are churn rates, evaluate feedback to understand if pricing, customer success, or features are misaligned with the customer experience.

Understand how customer experience is impacting business outcomes

Using tools like Medallia’s AI text and speech analytics, you’ll be able to see how CX is affecting the business in real time.

Personalize customer interactions

Organizations that track customer insights at the 1:1 level are able to personalize customer interactions across the company’s loyalty and reward programs and during customer service interactions, making customers feel welcomed and valued, enhancing loyalty.

Orchestrate smarter journeys

There’s a huge opportunity for brands to use customer insights to better orchestrate customer journeys. Medallia’s experience orchestration tools can help your organization react to customer needs in real time, guiding them through more personalized experiences.

Monitoring customer journey metrics for critical CX insights

The field of customer experience is constantly evolving. With the rapid rise of AI adoption and changing customer expectations, brands that can deliver fresh, meaningful, and personalized experiences are getting ahead of their competitors. A successful CX team needs tools and insights that enable real-time understanding into exactly what customers want, where they want it, and when — and help you take action faster than ever before.

Do you suspect your organization might be missing critical insights from your customers? Check out our guide, Evaluating the Effectiveness of Your CX Platform, to better understand where your program might be falling short.