What is customer experience (CX)? And how can you measure and improve it?

Customers may have hundreds of interactions with your company over the course of your relationship, where each one represents an individual data point on how they feel about your products, services, and more. Measuring these data points over a customer’s life cycle is challenging by itself. It becomes exponentially more complex when you scale it across the hundreds, thousands—or more—people who make up your customer base.

Yet this holistic understanding of how your customers feel about your organization defines customer experience (CX) and is key to driving loyalty, growth, and revenue for companies around the world. Customer experience is how customers perceive your organization as a result of all the contact they have with your team and your products—from when your relationship starts to when they stop working with you.

Measuring and tracking customer experience is essential to helping your organization achieve success, but doing so requires a thoughtful process. You’ll need to collect the right types of feedback and analyze them comprehensively, quickly, and collaboratively.

We’ll show you how, and we’ll provide the resources you need to start measuring customer experience. To start, we’ll talk about why CX is so important, but if you’re eager to skip ahead to a specific section, you can click-through the following table of contents!

There’s a seemingly endless number of statistics that validate the importance of CX. For example:

Unfortunately, organizations by and large fail to live up to customer’s standards. According to research by Bain & Company, 4 out of 5 CEOs think they provide customers with superior experiences, but only 8% of those customers agree.

To give clients what they’re looking for, you have to get systematic. You’ll need to continuously collect feedback from every customer, analyze their responses, and share them out across the team so they can take action.

Let’s begin our step-by-step walkthrough of this framework by reviewing the different ways you can assess customer sentiment.

To measure customer experience successfully, you’ll need to be thoughtful about how you collect feedback as well as what you ask. There are several ways that companies measure customer experience, each with their own set of pros and cons.

1. Run customer surveys. Surveys are probably the most common method for measuring customer experience, and it’s not hard to see why. Since you can use one questionnaire to gather thousands of responses, you can make short work of measuring even the largest groups of customers.  

Pros:

They’re automated. With a sophisticated survey solution, like SurveyMonkey CX, you can set parameters that trigger your survey’s delivery (e.g. once a customer finishes onboarding).

Cons:

Data collection can be a touchy subject. Explicitly mention that your survey is anonymous. Otherwise, customers might think their responses can be traced back to them, which can make them uncomfortable in providing candid feedback.

2. Interview individual customers. If you want to get detailed, in-depth feedback from the people you rely on for your business, there’s no better way than to talk to them directly. It may seem time consuming, but direct contact with customers can be well worth it.

Pros:

Cons:

3. Conduct focus groups. Focus group discussions tend to be more free-form than surveys or direct interviews, which are usually scripted. You don’t even have to get everyone in the same room to have a focus group—you can hold the meetings over video conference or on the phone.

Pros:

Cons:

It can encourage groupthink. Participants may feel inclined to agree with each other, even when they feel differently.

No matter how you plan to collect feedback, there are certain questions you’ll want to ask. Let’s review what they are.

Note: These approaches to collecting feedback should complement your analysis of financial data points. These include your churn rate (the rate that customers stop using your product or service after a given period of time) and your average customer lifetime value (the expected profit you’ll receive from a customer over the course of your relationship with them.).

1. Net Promoter Score® (NPS): The most widely used customer experience metric is the Net Promoter Score. From understanding the likelihood that customers will churn to the chance they’re willing to buy additional products or services, no metric is better for understanding the likelihood that your customers stick around and buy more from you in the future. 

The NPS can be used to measure the customer experience at specific time-based intervals (“Relational NPS”) or following a defined set of customer experiences (“Transactional NPS”), like after a customer makes a purchase or speaks to a service representative.  

The NPS comes from the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” But it’s often also applied to products, services, or interactions with companies. Respondents are asked to select a rating from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest), and once the responses come back, it applies a formula that results in a Net Promoter Score, which can range from -100 to +100. 

Pro tip: If you use the NPS question in our Question Bank, SurveyMonkey will automatically calculate your score once the responses come back.

We consider the NPS question essential to ask, but here are some additional customer experience metrics worth considering:

2. Customer effort score (CES): Customer effort score measures how much effort the customer needs to exert in order to solve issues with your product or service. The idea is that the less friction customers experience with your product or service, the more likely they are to stay on and increase their level of spending. In general, the customer effort score is used to evaluate specific types of experiences in the customer journey (otherwise referred to as “transactional touchpoints”).

To evaluate your customer effort score, you can simply ask, “[Your company] made it easy for me to handle my issue.” with the answer choices ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. You can then assign numerical values to each choice. For instance, “Strongly agree” can be a 1, “Agree” can be a 2, “Neither agree nor disagree” can be a 3, and so on. You’d then calculate the average score from all of your answers, where a higher average rating reflects a higher level of effort for customers.

Learn more about using the customer effort score.

3. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: The CSAT score is designed to measure customers’ overall sentiment of something, like a product, company or service. Instead of focusing on a specific element of the customer experience, like loyalty or effort, it attempts to get a holistic read of customers’ feelings about an issue. The most common way to ask about general customer satisfaction in a survey is to ask, “How would you rate your experience with our (fill in the blank)?” with the answer choices ranging from very satisfied to very dissatisfied.

To get your CSAT score, take the number of satisfied customers (those who selected “very satisfied” and “satisfied”) and divide it by the total number of respondents. Then, multiply the fraction by 100 to give you a percentage—where a higher percentage means that, all else equal, you have more satisfied customers!

Read more about when you should use—and avoid—each of these customer experience metrics.

One of the best things about running customer surveys is that the feedback you receive is easy to analyze, understand, and act on. Since it comes in the form of survey data, it’s simple to quantify and measure your results and spot patterns that can inform how to improve customer experience. 

Review your survey results effectively by following these 4 steps:

Using SurveyMonkey Analyze, take a look at the responses from each of your closed-ended questions (prompts that ask respondents to select an answer from a predefined set of choices).