Your Guide to Customer Experience Monitoring

What is customer experience monitoring?

Customer experience monitoring (or CX monitoring) is when you track customer interactions across your website, mobile applications, social media channels, and other relevant platforms, from the first interaction to the final purchase and beyond.

You can gather this feedback from a variety of sources, including reviews, social media posts, and emails. You can also directly ask your customers for their thoughts through surveys and polls.

CX monitoring provides you with actionable insights to identify trends, discover what people think of your brand, and improve customer satisfaction.

Benefits of monitoring the customer experience

Customer experience monitoring solutions take time to plan and implement, but they’re worth the effort.

Some of the benefits of adding CX monitoring to your digital marketing strategy include:

• Detecting minor problems before they become major issues: CX monitoring allows you to proactively review customer journeys. If a customer experiences an issue, you can take decisive action to resolve it.
• Optimizing your business for sales: CX monitoring means you can quickly resolve customer pain points and identify performance issues, increasing revenue.
• Monitoring customer behavior in real time: CX monitoring lets you track customers as they travel through your website, app, and other platforms. It provides a simple way of determining the health of your business at any given time.
• Identifying trends: CX monitoring makes it easy to track several customers at once, meaning you gain insights into what your target audience likes and dislikes.
• Making customers feel heard: Asking for feedback shows you’re listening, which leads to increased customer loyalty.

5 customer experience metrics to give you an edge

A significant part of monitoring the customer experience is gathering the right data.

Having the right CX metrics in place means you can make changes to your systems based on objective evidence and the specific pain points your customers are experiencing.

There are many performance metrics you can collect, but here are 5 key metrics to get you started.

Metric #1: Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with the products and services you provide.

With CSAT, you ask, “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the goods or services you received?” You then ask customers to rate you on a scale, typically between 1 and 3, 1 and 5, or 1 and 10.

Customer satisfaction score is a good CX metric because it’s flexible. You choose what areas you want feedback on, whether it’s the quality of your products or the service provided by your Support team.

However, it’s narrow as you’re asking for feedback about a specific interaction, rather than customer satisfaction as a whole.

Metric #2: Net promoter score (NPS)

Net promoter score (NPS) is a simple way to measure if you provide a positive customer experience, to the point that your customers are loyal to your brand.

NPS asks 1 question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend our company to a colleague or friend?” Customers are then segmented into 3 categories:

• Promoters: Those who rate you a 10 or 9—customers who are loyal advocates for your business.
• Passives: Those who rate you an 8 or 7—satisfied customers who are happy but are open to what your competitors have to offer.
• Detractors: Those who rate you from a 6 to a 0—customers who are unhappy and may be critical of your business.

You gather your NPS score by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

NPS provides a broader viewpoint than CSAT, as it measures the overall customer experience and relationship with your brand.

However, like CSAT, it doesn’t offer feedback on why customers have scored you a certain way. It also ignores passives, who may provide valuable insights into why they’re indifferent about your brand.

Metric #3: Customer effort score (CES)

Customer effort score (CES) measures the effort customers have to make when completing a task.

With this customer experience metric, you ask, “How easy was it to resolve your issue today?” and get your customers to rate you on a scale of your choice.

The key advantage of CES is that it helps you see how easy (or difficult) customers find it to interact with different elements of your business, providing you with data you can use to improve your processes.

However, it’s vital to ask your customers for information as soon as possible. Ask too late, and they may not be able to score you accurately. Using automation helps.

Metric #4: Customer churn rate

Customer churn rate measures how many customers you have lost over a specific time period, typically a month or a quarter. It shows how many customers are happy and how many feel frustrated enough to walk away.

You measure it by dividing the number of customers you have lost during a certain time by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that time period. You then multiply by 100 to find the percentage.

The advantage of measuring customer churn is that it provides a snapshot of the health of your business. If your churn rate suddenly spikes, it’s a sign that something is wrong.

You can also create segments to get more insights, for example, separating new customers from long-term customers.

Metric #5: Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value (CLV) measures the value of a customer over the lifetime of their relationship with your business.

While it’s a harder customer experience metric to measure, it’s insightful because it allows you to track customer loyalty and how the customer experience you provide affects it.

You measure it by identifying the average order value, multiplying it by the average order frequency, and the average customer lifespan.

Like customer churn rate, you can segment this CX metric to understand your different customers and what drives their loyalty to your business.

How to make the most of customer experience monitoring

We’ve looked at how to measure customer experience, but how can you set up CX monitoring to meet customer expectations every time?

Here are some of our expert tips for introducing customer experience monitoring to your business.

Choose the right metrics

It’s best to choose at least 2 customer experience metrics to monitor. This ensures you measure customer feedback at all stages of the sales funnel.

For example, NPS and CLV are ideal for measuring customer loyalty, while CSAT and CES are great for monitoring one-off interactions.

The right CX metric for your business depends on what you sell, your target audience, and how much time and resources you dedicate to tracking metrics.

It’s important to remember that while quantitative metrics are useful, they don’t tell you everything. They’re best combined with qualitative feedback so you can understand why customers rated you a certain way.

Ensure your systems communicate

You can get valuable customer data from a wide range of sources, including:

• Your CRM system
• CX tools (like heatmaps)
• Analytics software (like Google Analytics)
• Online transactions
• Review sites
• Social media platforms and social listening tools
• Help desks
• Chatbots

Establishing a unified data architecture with a centralized dashboard or business intelligence tool ensures all your data is easily accessible, helps you spot trends, and allows you to automate tasks.

Combine with application performance monitoring (APM)

CX monitoring only tells you half of the story. Combining it with application performance monitoring (APM) means you can look at the end-user journey as well as how your web applications support it.

Application performance monitoring looks at the infrastructure, databases, and code behind your systems and flags any performance issues that may have an impact on the customer experience.

For example, imagine your digital experience monitoring tools identify that your servers are running more slowly than usual. You can check to see if this translates into CX performance concerns, like an increase in abandoned carts, and take proactive action to keep customers happy.

Act on your performance data

It’s not enough to just track and measure your customer data—you need to implement measures based on it.

Make the data you gather accessible to all members of your team through a dashboard and regular meetings. That way, everyone can review it and use the data in the decisions they make.

Also, establish a clear feedback loop. Identify how you will analyze data, respond to the customer, and improve service quality moving forward.

Track business growth with customer experience monitoring

Data-driven decision-making is a must for any business. Getting a grip on customer experience monitoring means understanding how customers perceive you and taking steps to transform them into your biggest fans.

Let us leave you with a final piece of advice—CX monitoring is not a one-off thing. It needs to be an ongoing process, so you always know how your business is performing in the eyes of your customers.

Our CRM software for small businesses helps you get to know your customers, down to the smallest detail. Find out what they like, what they dislike, and start to understand patterns in your CX metrics.