Metrics are at the heart of every successful customer experience (CX) strategy. Knowing what to measure, how to measure it, and how to act on that information can help businesses transform their CX efforts into tangible outcomes. In a recent webinar, we explored these critical points and provided actionable insights into how organizations can use metrics to elevate CX and advance business goals. We received many questions during the webinar, so we thought we’d recap the key takeaways and some of the recurring themes from those questions.

What Types Of Metrics Should I Be Tracking?

To truly understand your customer experience and its impact, it’s important to track three main types of metrics:

  1. Perception Metrics: These capture how customers feel about their interactions with your brand. Perception metrics help you gauge whether your CX promise aligns with customer sentiment and expectations. Data sources include surveys, reviews, social media comments, and call recordings; metric examples include satisfaction, ease, and confidence.
  2. Outcome Metrics: These measure customers’ actual or intended behaviors following their experience. Outcome metrics help build a business case for CX investments when you use them to understand which perceptions cause the desired behaviors. Sample outcome metrics track actual behaviors, like retention, or intended behaviors (as Net Promoter Score℠ [NPS] does).
  3. Interaction Metrics: Tracking what happens during customer interactions, these metrics are drawn from operational data or analytic systems. Interaction metrics contextualize perception results and reveal inefficiencies or pain points. For example, they might highlight when customers experience wait times, which could lower their perception of ease.

It’s not enough to look at these three types of metrics on their own. For a more complete picture of CX performance, you need to consider them in the context of the three levels of experience:

  • Relationship Level: This refers to the customer’s overall relationship with a firm — for example, what it’s like to be a customer of a bank. Measuring at this level allows you to gauge overall CX and predict customer behaviors.
  • Journey Level: Journeys are customers’ path and perception as they pursue a goal. Continuing with the bank example, one such journey is opening an account. Measuring at the journey level helps you understand journeys holistically, including the effect of different touchpoints and the interactions between them. This view is useful for identifying friction for customers.
  • Touchpoint Level: This level homes in on a concrete step within a journey and the channel in which that happens (e.g., evaluating different bank account options online or applying for a new account in person at a branch). Measuring these key moments can unearth specific improvement opportunities, which then feed into journey-level CX improvements. They also provide opportunities to respond quickly to customer complaints.

One attendee asked us about the best tool to map or track metrics across these three levels. We’ve seen companies have some success with journey-based dashboards that include metrics for the relationship that the journey is part of, along with journey metrics and touchpoint metrics. (Our colleague Joana de Quintanilha has published evaluations of journey orchestration tools that include functionality to show metrics on customer journeys — access to this research is available to Forrester clients.)

What’s The Right CX Metric, Or Metrics, For My Organization?

We heard several variations of this question in the webinar. First, we need to warn you that using “industry best practice” metrics is only the right strategy when your customers, strategy, capabilities, and priorities are the same as those of every other firm. Don’t choose a metric simply because other companies are using it. The right CX metric for your organization will depend on your specific goals. For example, if your goal is to satisfy people, measure customer satisfaction. If you are concerned with ease, measure that.

Second, decide what to focus on after you’ve identified the goals your firm is pursuing. Work backward from those goals. Choose outcome metrics that measure customer behaviors that contribute to those goals, then perception metrics and interaction metrics that are leading indicators of those behaviors.

A word here about NPS, as it’s one of the most commonly used metrics: NPS does not measure CX quality; it measures loyalty — an outcome of good CX quality. If you want to use it as a proxy metric for CX, ask yourself whether likelihood to recommend is the most appropriate and useful question. Is NPS correlated to a desired business impact? Will employees rally around it? NPS might not be the best metric in some cases — for example, for utility companies with a monopoly within a certain market.

Why Don’t Our Business Results And Customer Survey Responses Align?

The reason for this is usually that you didn’t define the right metrics or that there is so much pressure to achieve the metric that customers are asked to give a good rating. In any case, it probably doesn’t reflect everything that they feel about a business. This is one of the shortcomings of surveys — so it’s important to widen your focus to understand how customers feel about your company.

How Can I Use Metrics To Prove The Business Value Of CX?

Identifying metrics that show how CX improvements contribute to desired business outcomes is key. Company boards will likely want quantifiable results — you might give these by connecting metrics such as NPS or customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) to business outcomes like increased retention or decreased churn rates. When you try to link NPS to business outcomes, consider more than just the score.

But you also need to recognize that numbers alone aren’t enough. Pair numbers with compelling customer feedback or stories to illustrate how CX improvements positively impact the bottom line. (For more tips on building an effective CX business case, check out this on-demand webinar.)

How Can I Prove That Changes In Our Outcomes Were Driven By CX (And Not The Latest Marketing Campaign, Sales Push, Etc.)?

CX teams can do two things. First, be narrower in what you connect — for instance, don’t try to connect customers’ overall happiness or the overall profitability of the company. Instead, focus on how CX interventions improved a specific customer journey level and how that improved journey-specific business metrics. Do more customers now buy at the end of the journey? Are there fewer complaints during their journeys? Bringing cause and effect closer together helps tell your story.

Second, acknowledge that a CX team is often more of an orchestrator. CX’s value may lie in surfacing insights such as the specific aspects of the experience that need to be improved. But the implementation lies with others. That input is also valuable — and you should ask for some credit for it.

Watch the webinar replay for a more in-depth look at each of these points. And to take your measurement knowledge even further, join us at an upcoming CX Summit! Our CX Summit EMEA and CX Summit North America events will each feature sessions exploring measurement strategies and best practices that you can apply for meaningful change.