Customer experience monitoring platforms offer a wealth of data about every part of the customer journey, from initial contact to support calls and future purchases. But deciding how to measure customer experience isn’t always straightforward. 

While key performance indicators (KPIs) offer valuable insights that can help you identify trends, track progress, and make data-driven decisions, it's easy to get lost in the weeds and miss the bigger picture. If you over-index on the wrong metrics, you may find yourself heading in the wrong direction. Therefore, it’s essential to approach CX KPIs with nuance and purpose.

Especially with AI making it easier to delve into large amounts of data and identify trends, it’s also important that you don’t lose sight of why you’re tracking metrics: to help you make decisions around enhancing CX, building trust with customers, and maintaining their loyalty. 

Let’s explore some tips for selecting which customer experience KPIs to track and how to make the most of them.

Categorize and Prioritize

Understanding which KPIs to focus on can be daunting. To simplify this process, we recommend categorizing your metrics into four buckets:

1. North Star Metrics (Top Priority) — These are the non-negotiable customer experience management metrics that every CX department should track and monitor closely to ensure consistent performance. Examples include Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

2. Strategic, Move-the-Needle Metrics — Once your top-priority metrics are under control, these additional KPIs will help you make long-term strategic improvements that align with your business objectives, such as reducing churn rate, increasing First Contact Resolution (FCR), and improving Average Resolution Time (ART).

3. Insightful, Nice-to-Have Metrics — These metrics provide valuable insights and can allow for experimentation. They are more future-oriented, in that they can help you identify trends and opportunities for improvement. Examples include Total Completion Rate (TCR) and Recurring Customer Rate (RCR).

4. Social Metrics — Social media and social listening metrics allow you to gauge the sentiment of your customers on digital platforms, such as social media and third-party review sites. By using tools like sentiment scores and keyword analysis to analyze customer feedback, you can understand customer feelings toward your brand. Although these metrics are inherently more subjective than other KPIs, using consistent measurement tools will enable you to track changes and identify trends.

Your market landscape, business goals, and customer needs will change over time, so you’ll need to continually reevaluate how your metrics are categorized to ensure you're focusing on the most relevant ones at each stage.

Balance Tangible CX Goals with Business Objectives

While broad business metrics such as ROI, profitability, and growth aim to increase over time, CX metrics might show diminishing returns (or even become counterproductive) if not balanced properly. To avoid this, adopt a holistic approach that considers both broad business metrics and specific CX metrics.

To get the most out of your CX metrics, choose those that reflect larger goals. For example:

• Improved CSAT = Better ROI and customer loyalty
• Improved CES = Easier solutions = Increased likelihood of repeat business
• Improved NPS = Better ability to forecast future revenue gain / loss and word-of-mouth potential

Establishing these connections between CX-specific KPIs and broader ones will help you demonstrate progress to leadership in a way that aligns with their strategic goals. 

Don’t Overemphasize One KPI at the Expense of Others

One common pitfall in CX is focusing too narrowly on a specific KPI — and maintaining that focus for too long. This approach can lead to skewed priorities.

Take Average Handle Time (AHT), for instance — a popular metric that measures the average duration of a customer interaction. While most CX teams would likely agree that it’s valuable to measure, AHT is not the only thing that matters; customers appreciate quick solutions, but they also want to feel heard and valued, not rushed. 

This means that at some point, you won’t be able to decrease AHT any further without negatively impacting other customer service metrics. Striking that balance is a challenging but crucial aspect of CX, and it requires a holistic understanding of multiple KPIs — not just laser-focus on one.

For this reason, First Contact Resolution (FCR) is a better metric to track. In addition to gauging customer satisfaction by showing how many customers had their issues resolved on the first contact, it can also indicate cost reductions due to fewer interactions. Monitoring FCR can help you maintain the right balance in customer experience by ensuring that customers feel valued and their issues are resolved efficiently.

Consider Context

Always consider the context of your metrics, because analyzing individual KPIs in isolation can lead to an incomplete picture of the issues at hand.

For example, an increase in AHT might initially seem negative. However, if FCR is also increasing, it could signal a positive trend where customers’ issues are being resolved in one support interaction, without the need for follow-ups. Depending on your customers’ particular needs and preferences, one longer interaction might be preferable to multiple shorter ones. 

Customers also have varying needs, and some may require longer calls to solve complex issues. In that case, AHT might not be the best KPI for measuring customer satisfaction — instead, you might focus on metrics like FCR and CSAT to gauge the overall effectiveness of your support.

Similarly, if churn rate spikes, you’ll need to investigate other metrics like AHT, CSAT, and CES to help determine if CX issues are contributing to customer loss, or if it might be due to something else entirely.

Take a Collaborative Approach

Rather than allowing your CX metrics to stay siloed, share them across teams for a holistic view of your customer experience. This will allow you to align your efforts across your organization to improve the entire customer journey. 

Additionally, working with CX subject matter experts can provide invaluable insights and help you focus your efforts on the most impactful areas. The right partner can guide you in selecting and prioritizing KPIs that align with your business goals and customer needs — and adjust them accordingly as those needs change.

Start Getting More from Your CX KPIs

Tracking CX KPIs plays a crucial role in enhancing customer experiences, making business decisions, and maintaining customer loyalty. But with so much data available to analyze, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. By carefully selecting and intelligently analyzing the right KPIs for measuring customer experience, you can extract real value from your data. 

Whether your CX team already has specific KPI goals in mind or needs to establish them, SupportNinja can help. As a value-centric outsourcing partner, we won’t just measure industry standard KPIs and call it a day — we’ll work with your organization to establish the metrics that matter most to you, help you achieve your KPI goals, and continually realign our strategy with your evolving business needs for maximum success. Contact us to learn more.