CX metrics: How to measure them correctly?
Customer experience and how to measure it effectively
Customer experience is the sum of every interaction a customer has with a company, starting from how they heard about the company all the way to visiting the website, buying a product, or reaching out to support. It is a complex aspect that businesses need to keep track of, that’s why there are some customer experience metrics that will help with that.
Customer experience metrics show how customers perceive a company and help measure how satisfied customers are with their interactions. So, on a bigger scale these metrics help companies determine how their customers are feeling. Metrics help customers channel their emotions through data that can be turned into actionable insights.
There are several metrics that a company can use to measure and evaluate CX, but we don’t want you to overload with information so we condensed some of them. Out of all the metrics, we will share the most important ones that you can’t skip when evaluating how your customers are feeling. Let’s dive into the world of CX metrics!
What are customer experience metrics?
Customer experience metrics are indicators that help companies determine how their customers perceive their interactions throughout their journey. They are a structured way to quantify experiences that would rather be seen as subjective, turning perceptions into data. This data can later be used to improve a company’s CX.
The goal of implementing the right metrics is to analyze data that will determine trends or identify friction points to deal with current and future customer issues. The importance of customer experience measurement can’t be overstated.
Data shows that over 50% of customers will switch to a competitor after just one poor experience. Even more concerning, 96% of dissatisfied customers never voice their complaints, meaning many businesses lose customers without realizing why. This silence makes measuring customer experience crucial, for understanding satisfaction levels, and for detecting early warning signs before they affect revenue.
87% of customers say great customer service increases their trust in a company. Customer service is just one aspect of CX, so this shows how important it is to measure everything, as one aspect can make or break the entire experience. So now that you know the definition and importance of CX metrics, we can talk about some of them that need to be part of your strategy.
Customer experience metrics
A successful CX measurement strategy combines metrics from different business departments like customer journey, website, customer support, sales, social media, and more. Analyzing all these departments provides a holistic view of how each department supports each other and how their efforts reflect on the customer experience.
Customer journey metrics
Customer effort score
This metric helps companies measure how easy it is for a customer to perform an action, such as solving a problem, buying a product, reaching out to support, or canceling a subscription. This is one of the most important metrics as it determines friction which is an experience killer.
How to measure it: It is measured by creating a X-point scale to rate the effort as easy or hard. For example creating a survey that uses a 10-point scale where 1 is easy and 10 is very hard.
Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is a metric that will help determine the level of satisfaction a customer feels with a company. It can be used to measure several aspects of a company, the goal is to determine whether that aspect (e.g. customer support) is exceeding, meeting, or falling short with customer expectations.
How to measure it: Just as customer effort score, this metric uses a scale where you give the specific numbers a score and you ask the customer to rate their satisfaction based on those numbers.
Customer retention rate
Shows how effectively a business keeps its customers over a given period. High retention correlates strongly with positive customer experience measurement results. Companies with high customer retention save a lot of money as retaining customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones.
How to measure it: Customer retention = [(Customers at the end of a give period - New customers) / Customers at the start of a given period] X 100
Customer lifetime value
CLV represents the total revenue a company gets from one customer over the entirety of their relationship. This connects CX with a direct financial outcome, and measuring it combined with feedback positively impacts profitability. This shows the importance of investing in CX, which is also a strategic growth driver.
How to measure it: CLV = Average Purchase Value × Average Purchase Frequency × Average Customer Lifespan
Customer churn
Tracks how many customers stop doing business with your company. Rising churn often indicates unresolved pain points or declining satisfaction. Monitoring churn alongside other CX metrics like NPS and CES helps identify where customer experience is breaking down before it impacts growth.
It is a great metric that helps measure how many customers left a company. The thing is it doesn’t give the whole picture, it only shows how many customers you lost but not why they left. The key is to combine it with customer satisfaction and customer feedback to better understand why some customers are leaving. But to prevent churn you can also take a look at net promoter score and customer effort score which identifies areas of improvement.
How to measure it: Customer churn = (Customers lost during a given period / Customers at the beginning of a given period) X 100
Customer engagement
Assesses how often and meaningfully customers interact with your brand, through purchases, social media, app use, or loyalty programs. Higher engagement signals stronger emotional connection and interest. As an element of measuring customer experience, engagement helps predict long-term loyalty.
Related metrics to measure it: Conversion rate, customer retention, website engagement, website impressions, etc.
Customer sentiment
Leverages AI, natural language processing, and text analytics to analyze tone, emotion, and opinion in customer feedback, reviews, and support tickets. Sentiment analysis gives depth to quantitative data, revealing how customers feel, not just what they do.
Sentiment analysis gives a better understanding of how customers feel with a company and whether or not they feel a deep connection with a business. You can use AI to analyze what customers are saying online or to process qualitative data, or you can use a scale where you ask customers to rate.
How to measure it: With a scale where you give a specific value to numbers and ask your customers to rate their emotional connection and feelings towards a company.
Website metrics
Bounce rate
Measures how often visitors leave a page without interacting. A high bounce rate can signal poor content relevance, confusing navigation, or unmet expectations, issues that directly impact customer experience KPIs tied to acquisition and engagement.
A website metric that shows how often visitors leave a page without interacting with it. The scores can help you determine areas of improvement in the website related to poor content or structure. Your website needs to be polished enough that your visitors find value out of interacting with it and structured in a way that clearly shows why you are their best option.
How to measure it: Bounce Rate = Number of single-page sessions / Total number of sessions X 100
Usage rate
It measures how frequently and deeply customers engage with a digital product or website. Frequent use often indicates perceived value and ease of access, while low usage suggests complexity or lack of relevance. It’s a valuable CX metric for assessing the usability and stickiness of digital experiences.
How to measure it: Usage rate = Total amount of website visits by a customer / Time period
Click through rate
Monitors how often users click on specific content, like blogs, ads, social media posts, or calls-to-action. CTR reflects engagement quality and helps optimize the customer journey from awareness to conversion. It is a great metric that shows if certain content is relevant and effective to catch people’s attention.
How to measure it: CTR = (Total Clicks / Total Impressions) x 100
Other metrics
- Customer service metrics: Average resolution time, average response time, average hold time, ticket deflection rate, and contact resolution rate
- Social media metrics: Audience engagement, content reach, followers growth, brand mentions, and content watch time.
- Sales metrics: Customer churn, conversion rate, average deal size, sales qualified leads, and win rate.
How do you measure customer experience
With several metrics to keep track of out there, you might get overwhelmed when it comes to measuring CX. Don’t worry, you can choose from many methods, but knowing about them will help you make the right decisions. So, let’s share some of the most common ways to measure customer experience.
CX surveys
CX surveys provide scalable ways to gather data, which makes them a perfect form of measuring CX. It provides quantitative data to identify trends and pain points to improve the customer journey. To have a better understanding of how the customer is feeling, you must include open-ended questions that will provide qualitative data, where you can identify how each individual feels and if there are certain repeated emotions among your customers.
Focus groups
Focus groups are great to collect qualitative data. They bring together a group of people that will share their experiences. People will feel more comfortable to share their feelings when they have a group that understands them. This turns more into an exchange of experiences from different people and it comes with valuable insights.
1:1 interviews
This proves great to connect with your customers on a deeper level, where they provide more detailed insights than in a survey. It works great to understand a customer better. This works well when you want to get a clear picture of how individuals feel, maybe you heard a customer say they had a bad experience and you want to comprehend why it happened in a detailed manner. It helps understand your customer’s context that builds their perception of you.
Social listening
Social listening is a great way of capturing what your customers say online, by tracking brand mentions, comments, videos, or customer conversations. This is where you get raw data, because people will share what they feel without any prompts or bias. You can get both quantitative and qualitative data out of this, which makes it a perfect way to measure CX.
AI software
AI tools can help you collect, analyze, and report large amounts of data in a short period of time. This makes it easier for you to understand your customers and come with a solution faster. They are also great when it comes to correlating data, being able to match some metrics and come with insights that would be overlooked instead.
How to choose what CX metrics to measure?
Selecting the right key performance indicators for customer experience depends on your business goals, customer journey, and industry context, so it is important to align metrics with business goals. For example, use NPS and retention rate if loyalty is your focus, or CES if your goal is to reduce friction in support.
Match metrics to customer journey stages. Measure CES during post-support stages, and NPS or CSAT after purchase or renewal. This will help you determine which metrics to keep in track when new customers buy and when current customers repeat sales, making sure you track exactly what you need to understand them.
Blend quantitative and qualitative data, to have a holistic view of CX. You must go beyond numbers, if you keep record of numerical data only, then you are missing a key aspect, people’s emotions. Numbers don’t tell the whole story, but on the other hand, just having qualitative data will overwhelm you with different perspectives.
Tailor metrics by industry. You need to understand what your customers are looking for in your specific industry. Getting to know this will help you match customer intent with your business goals, providing a better understanding of how to tackle their needs.
Only 3% of companies are truly customer-obsessed, yet they achieve 41% faster revenue growth and 49% faster profit growth than others. Choosing the right customer experience KPIs are the foundation of that performance.
Best practices for measuring customer experience metrics
Avoid bias information
Make sure you are asking the right questions and phrasing them correctly to avoid receiving biased responses. If not, your data will be useless, trying to tweak responses to your favor will only hurt your business eventually, as you will not be reflecting what your customers really want. Stay neutral to avoid sabotaging your own CX.
Don’t harass customers for answers
Some customers are willing to provide feedback, some are not, and that’s okay, the tricky part is finding out who is who. But it is important to understand what sector does want to share feedback, if not you will only be pushing them away. Even the most willing customer will get tired if you become too insistent. So, be respectful and do not follow up many times to prevent terrorizing your customers.
Analyze beyond numerical data
Numerical data only tells one part of the story, emotions and valuable insights don’t come from percentages only. Make sure you measure CX with more than only surveys, even if they can include open-ended questions, nothing beats focus groups or 1:1 interviews when it comes to enriching conversations that end up with organic feedback. Qualitative data explains the why beyond the numbers.
Automate when necessary
AI is not your enemy, so take advantage of it as a work partner. These tools exist to make your life easier, and one of the ways it does this is by automating some of the repetitive tasks that take too much time. Keep your human team close, as AI also needs supervision, the idea is to have AI as a companion that provides valuable information immediately while the human takes care of complex cases.
Collect feedback from all your touchpoints
Obtaining a holistic view of your customer experience only comes from understanding every aspect of it. Your business touchpoints are important to understand how your customers interact with your company. Knowing what needs improvement ensures your touchpoints are making interactions easier.
Regularly collect data
Collecting data is not a one-time-only thing, your customers’ needs are evolving fast and so must your company if you want to survive in a competitive market. When you collect data regularly you are better prepared to anticipate trends and offer value to your customers. CX is an engine that needs timely maintenance to work better.
Adopt a customer first mindset
Your business exists to satisfy your customers’ needs, remember you created it wanting to supply a need. So, they are your most valuable asset and their voice needs to be heard, meaning that your CX needs to be built around the idea of offering value to your customers. Having your customers in mind when tracking metrics and acting on them ensures your company’s CX is a growth driver.
Map the entire journey to know how to gather feedback
Get into your customers’ mind by tracing their journey and imagine first how your company can satisfy their needs based on common knowledge from your industry. Then immediately ask them if they find their interactions valuable and how can the company improve. They will let you know what exactly is falling short so you can focus on it.
Select the right metrics
You must not measure just for the sake of it, you need to do it strategically. As we mentioned, you need to make sure your business goals, customers’ needs, and industry conditions are aligned with your metrics. Selecting the right metrics keeps efforts focused and insights actionable, preventing data overload.
The customer must get something in return
Your customers need to know their insights are being listened to and not just simply collected. When they share feedback, they only ask for one thing in return, for you to act on it. If you don’t, they won’t be open to share their insights again, why would they waste their time if not? Make sure your improvements are customer focused and they will happily share more with you.
Experience the real power of customer experience data
CX metrics are not just nice-to-haves that will fill checkboxes and lead to nowhere, they must have actions attached to it. Selecting the right metrics and knowing how to measure them effectively is key to surpass customer expectations.
At Mentors CX we know some companies struggle with measuring their CX, that’s why we want to help you. Search for our available mentors and ask them for help, they will gladly support you in choosing valuable metrics. Your customers will keep coming back and new ones will join as your company shows they listen and act on feedback.