10 Customer Metrics You Should Be Keeping An Eye On 👀

Another Friday. Another bangin' newsletter.

Thanks to everyone who shared last week's newsletter on Speech Analytics. We hope that you found the content useful!

Before we get into the world of CX metrics, let's have a laugh together ...

DAD JOKE OF THE WEEK 😆

What’s the best way to watch a fly-fishing tournament? Live stream 🐟.

10 customer metrics your business should keep an eye on 🎯

If you're an organisation that solely relies on an NPS / CSAT score to measure customer experience, you're doing it wrong. The ways that customers interact with organisations has evolved. As such, the ways that we measure customer experience needs to evolve as well.

Below, we outline 10 customer KPIs that you should be looking to measure within your business.

Note: we have intentionally excluded NPS & CSAT from this list to stimulate thought about additional metrics that could be used to measure customer outcomes.

Metric 1: Customer Effort Score (CES) 😤

• What it measures: The amount of effort involved by the customer in achieving their goals. A lot of organisations claim to provide a "frictionless" customer journey. The CES is a way to determine whether this is actually true.

• Methodology: Customer survey question; generally on a 7-point or 11-point scale

  • [Company] made it easy for me to achieve my goal

• Data Source(s): Solicited feedback i.e. customer surveys.

Metric 2: First Contact Resolution (FCR) ✔️

• What it measures: The proportion of customers who have their enquiry solved for them within the first contact. This question could vary depending on your business model however the primary purpose of an FCR metric is to assess the effectiveness of the interaction according to the customer. Where possible, you want to be able to identify inefficiencies in the way that customer-agent interactions occur.

• Methodology: Customer survey question; generally as a "Yes", "No" option.

  • Did [company] resolve your enquiry today?

• Data Source(s): Solicited feedback i.e. customer surveys.

Metric 3: Social Sentiment Score (SSS) ✍️

• What it measures: The key themes & sentiment associated with customers who mention or interact with your brand on social media.

• Methodology: Text Analytics should be used to analyse all commentary:

  • Sentiment Score: a score generally ranging from -1 to +1 should be produced for each comment.

  • Key Themes: identifies emerging concerns or kudos that your business gets in the public domain.

  • Social Score: an aggregated view of performance across different review sites i.e. Google Reviews, Yelp etc.

• Data Source(s): Social media & review sites e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google, TrustPilot

Metric 4: Contact Experience Score (CXS) ☎️

• What it measures: 100% of interactions between customers and agents within your contact centre - email, SMS, webchat, phone.

• Methodology: an automated score between 0-100 which is produced by leveraging speech & text analytics capabilities. It analyses the transcript of the interaction and applies sentiment analysis & Natural Language Processing (NLP) to objectively understand the entirety of the interaction. Intrigued? We wrote about it in more detail here.

• Data Source(s): any bi-directional discussion i.e. email, webchat, SMS, phone.

Metric 5: Digital Experience Score (DXS) 🕸

• What it measures: The behaviour of your customers across your digital properties (website & app).

• Methodology: The Digital Experience Score (DXS) is a proprietary metric unique to Medallia's Digital Experience Analytics tool ranging from 0-10. The score is comprised of 5 key pillars:

  • Form Experience Score (FXS): monitors the behaviour of users on webforms.

  • Frustration Score (FS): monitors friction points on website by highlighting frustrating behaviours i.e. birds nesting, unresponsive multi-clicks.

  • Navigation Score (NS): monitors whether the user easily navigates through the website, or whether they continually have to go backwards to move forwards.

  • Engagement Score (ES): monitors level of engagement with content on pages i.e. highlighting text, rapid scrolling etc.

  • Technical Score (TS): monitors technical errors (404s, javascript failures) throughout user experience

• Data Source(s): Website or App.

Metric 6: Customer Retention / Net Revenue Retention (NRR) 🪣

• What it measures: How leaky your bucket is. Retention focuses on trying to calculate what proportion of your customer base is hanging around. The lower your retention rate, the leakier your bucket. 

• Methodology:

  • Retention %: The % of customers who still transact with your company after a certain period. It is most commonly calculated on an annual basis. For example, if 100 customers purchased a subscription on 1st January 2021 but only 80 of those customers had the subscription on 1st January 2022, your retention rate would be 80%.

  • Net Revenue Retention (NRR) %: The % of revenue that you have been able to generate from existing customers within the annual period. World-class companies don't just retain their customers. They upsell more products / services into these customers. A world-class NRR is 130% which ultimately means that the customers who signed up 1 year ago now spend 30% more than what they initially signed up for.

• Data Source(s): CDP + financial system. In order to calculate retention & NRR, you must be able to tie every transaction to a particular customer.

Metric 7: First Response Time (FRT) 🚨

• What it measures: the amount of time it takes for an organisation to get back to their customers (across all channels i.e. phone, webchat etc). We would recommend using this metric instead of avg resolution time as FRT is entirely within business control.

• Methodology: FRT = [Time Responded - Time Contacted]. This is a metric which calculates the time that it took for somebody to respond to a customer request. This metric may be called different things depending on the channel i.e. ASA (average speed of answer), expected response time etc. Before setting goals / SLAs for each channel, we would strongly recommend establishing a baseline and also understand the minimal acceptable standard from a customer perspective.

• Data Source(s): Contact Centre Platforms - Telephony, Webchat, Email, CRMs, Social Media etc.

Metric 8: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) 💰

• What it measures: the value (revenue) that a customer has generated across the entire period that they have been a customer of your business.

• Methodology: a cumulative total of all transactions that a customer has had with your organisation. Theoretically, the higher the LTV, the more loyal that a customer becomes. This is an extremely useful metric to overlay with your customer metrics to determine correlations i.e. whether promoters have a higher LTV versus detractors.

• Data Source(s): Financial System / CDP.

Metric 9: Responses to Resolve (R2R) 🎫

• What it measures: the ability of your organisation to resolve interactions efficiently.

• Methodology: for channels like SMS, email & webchat, this metric looks at the number of responses it takes for a customer to have their enquiry resolved. This metric is effective for two reasons;

  • 1 - it allows you to quickly identify agents who may be taking longer to resolve things compared to others.

  • 2 - it allows you to quantify the cost of each channel, allowing your business to fine-tune the omnichannel approach for certain types of interactions.

Note: Similar to Average Handle Time (AHT), it is important that this metric is not used primarily for performance-based discussions. You do not want to decrease the responses to resolve average at the expense of providing a great customer experience.

• Data Source(s): Email, Webchat & SMS tools.

Metric 10: Earned Growth Rate (EGR) 🍁

• What it measures: the sustainable growth of your business by retaining existing customers and obtaining new customers via word of mouth / referrals.

• Methodology: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) + Earned New Customers (ENC), where ENC is the % of new business which comes from word of mouth / referrals. The concept behind this metric is that your business will be able to quantify the volume of sustainable growth that you're obtaining. All growth included within EGR comes from existing customers and/or customers who have been referred to your business by a friend (otherwise known as FREE advertising). Read more about this metric here.

• Data Source(s): This is a complex metric which will require some customer accounting. In order to produce this metric, the finance team will need the 3 following metrics:

  • Net Revenue Retention %: (Total Customer Revenue - Lost Customer Revenue) / Total Customer Revenue*100

  • Earned New Customers %: Total New Organic Customers / Total New Customers

Graph of the Week 📈

The below visual from Harvard Business Review explains the importance of being able to measure Earned Growth Rate. To summarise the below, Earned Growth Rate quickly highlights organisations who have sustainable, customer-generated growth VS organisations who aggressively buy new customers.

If you would like to discuss the below concept in more depth, please reach out;