How to measure customer experience with pinpoint accuracy

Building brand loyalty starts with creating a memorable customer experience (CX). CX refers to the overall impression a customer forms about your brand throughout their journey and across all brand touchpoints. 

For instance, when purchasing a product online, their CX would encompass:

• The ease of finding the product
• The checkout process
• Order and delivery communication
• Condition of the product and its packaging upon arrival
• Customer service communication and efficiency

Three in four US shoppers rank CX as the most influential factor when choosing between competing brands. A positive CX encourages repeat business, fosters brand loyalty, and generates positive word-of-mouth. 

However, creating a positive customer experience requires a firm understanding of your customers’ expectations throughout their journey, as well as your brand’s current CX. 

In this article, we’ll outline nine ways to accurately measure CX for a comprehensive view of your customer journey.

What are the most important CX metrics to track?

Tracking the right CX metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) helps you gauge the effectiveness of your current efforts. It offers a clear view of your company’s performance, highlighting strengths and areas for improvement—from the initial interaction to post-purchase support.

The best CX metrics to track include:

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): CSAT measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, product, or service. To determine this score, brands typically ask customers to rate their satisfaction after a given interaction or milestone.

• Net promoter score (NPS): NPS is a measure of customer loyalty and brand satisfaction. The survey usually contains 1–2 questions, asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending your products or services to a friend or colleague, on a scale of 0 to 10.

• Customer lifetime value (CLV): CLV is the total value (in terms of revenue, purchase frequency, etc.) that a customer brings to your company during their relationship with your brand.

• Churn rate: This is the number of customers you’re losing over a particular interval of time. Churn rate is a crucial metric for SaaS businesses with recurring revenue models. 

• Retention rate: This is the total number of customers who buy repeatedly from your business over a specific timeframe.

How to accurately measure customer experience

1. Conduct a customer experience audit

A customer experience audit is essential to understand the current state of your CX efforts, through CX testing and analysis of how these efforts impact each customer touchpoint. The goal is to identify what’s working and what needs improvement. 

Here’s a CX audit checklist:

• Determine which departments or touchpoints you’ll be measuring. Are you focusing on a specific product or service, or the overall customer journey?

• Map your ideal customer journey, from initial awareness to the post-purchase phase. Identify key touchpoints where customers interact with your business.

• Note which metrics are currently being measured, where there’s room for improvement, and who is responsible for implementing these improvements.

• Identify gaps in your current CX strategy and pinpoint metrics that need better tracking.

2. Choose the most relevant CX metrics to track

While there are multiple metrics you can track as part of your CX measurement initiative, they likely won’t all be relevant to your CX goal. 

Let’s say you want to understand how much effort it takes for customers to subscribe to your newsletter from your website, or to resolve an issue via your support team. 

In this case, you’ll want to measure customer effort score (CES), which reveals how easy the process is for your customers on a scale of 1 to 5.

So, how will you know which metrics to track?

Based on the CX audit data, identify customer touchpoints that need attention. Then, determine the associated metrics for those touchpoints and track them regularly.

3. Set customer-centric goals

According to HubSpot, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than others. In other words, prioritizing customer experience at each touchpoint is key to long-term success.

To achieve this, you need to set customer-centric goals that take your customers’ needs, aspirations, and pain points into account. Here’s a breakdown of how to set customer-centric goals:

• Use customer metrics like churn rate, NPS, CES, CSAT, and more to understand their interests, purchase behavior, and preferences.

• Use CLV data to segment customers, identifying opportunities to upsell, nurture, or show gratitude to top spenders and repeat buyers.

• Track service-oriented metrics like average resolution time to gauge the efficiency of your customer service team and identify members who need more training to handle customer problems better. 

• Take time to understand your customers’ omnichannel experience. Use data from each touchpoint, especially sentiment analysis, to dig into customer feedback and identify points of frustration. Your omnichannel experience should be as seamless as possible.

4. Use surveys and gather customer feedback

Surveys are one of the best CX research methods to measure customer sentiment and gauge their emotions when interacting with your brand. But effective CX research requires more than a single survey; you’ll need a combination of surveys, data analytics, customer feedback and more—done on an ongoing basis. 

Here’s how to use surveys to your advantage:

• Tailor surveys to gather feedback on specific aspects of the customer experience. For example, you can ask customers to rate their experience after engaging with customer support. 

• To maximize participation and completion rates, keep surveys concise and focused. Aim to get customer insights without requiring much time or effort. Use a mix of closed-ended (multiple-choice, rating scales) and open-ended (text-based) questions to gather both quantitative and qualitative insights.

• Select appropriate channels to distribute surveys, including email, website pop-ups, mobile apps, or social media.

• Establish a cadence for collecting feedback, whether it’s after specific interactions (e.g., customer support calls, purchase transactions) or at regular intervals (e.g., quarterly or annually).

• Offer incentives or rewards for completing surveys to increase response rates.

• Use UX research platforms like WEVO to understand the sentiment behind these surveys. WEVO lets you track user behavior and reveal where users clicked on each page of their journey. You can also uncover what your customers like or dislike about specific page elements.

5. Map the customer journey and identify key touchpoints

A crucial part of measuring your CX involves going through your entire customer journey to identify frictions and high points across customer touchpoints. Here’s how:

Step 1: Map your customer journey

Create a visual layout of the various stages a customer might go through to take a specific action. For example, when buying a product a customer might:

• See an ad for the product
• Visit your website
• Sign up to your newsletter for special offers and deals
• Receive nurture emails 
• Make a purchase with a coupon code
• Share an unboxing video on their social channels to get another discount code

The mapped journey doesn’t necessarily need to be the exact journey every customer follows. Some might go to your social media after checking your ad, for instance.

Step 2: Identify customer touchpoints

These touchpoints are typically categorized as pre-sale (social media, landing pages), sale (website), and post-sale (thank you page, promotional emails)—spanning all instances where your customers interact with your brand.

Step 3: Gather data from each touchpoint 

Track metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, bounce rates, email open rates, customer feedback, and NPS using tools like Google Analytics, your CRM, and customer surveys.

Step 4: Diagnose friction points in your customer journey

Using this gathered data, determine which touchpoints are performing poorly. Use the AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to inform your diagnosis. 

For example, the attention stage usually aligns with the pre-sales phase, where a customer visits your website for the first time. If you see a high bounce rate or low time-on-page for your homepage, it may indicate that your attention-stage touchpoints need some work. 

6. Analyze the customer experience

Once you’ve collected feedback from customer surveys and mapped the customer journey, it’s time to analyze the data, identify trends, and find areas for improvement. 

For meaningful analysis to be possible, you’ll need to store CX data in a centralized system then consider both quantitative metrics (e.g., satisfaction scores, NPS) and qualitative insights (e.g., customer comments, suggestions).

Next, focus on various aspects of the customer journey to gain insights into customers’ thoughts, feelings, actions, and pain-points at those touchpoints. Here’s a breakdown of key questions to consider in your analysis:

• What is the customer thinking and feeling at each stage of the journey?
• Which emotions and motivations are driving their actions and decisions?
• What actions do customers take as they progress through the journey?
• Where do customers get stuck or experience challenges in their journey?
• What can be improved in each stage of the experience?
• How best should this change be implemented?

Use empathy mapping or customer personas to visualize the customer’s perspective and mindset throughout the journey.

7. Leverage internal data

Use data-backed insights to drive your CX efforts and improvements. Here’s how to leverage your company’s internal data at each stage of the customer journey:

Awareness stage

• Analyze website performance to identify the most effective channels and content types driving traffic and engagement.
• Track metrics to understand how a page or piece of content is performing, including website traffic, social media engagement, time-on-page, and engagement rate.

Consideration stage

• Monitor sales metrics such as lead generation, email open rates, and click-through rates.
• Use lead scoring models to prioritize high-quality leads based on engagement and behavior data.

Decision stage

• Analyze conversion funnels to identify potential drop-off points in your funnel.
• Review sales insights to find common questions, concerns, and barriers to purchase, then tailor decision-stage messaging accordingly.

Delight stage

• Monitor customer satisfaction scores, post-purchase engagement metrics, and churn rates.
• Continuously monitor customer feedback and sentiment to identify recurring issues or dissatisfaction factors.

8. Use customer analytics and insights tools

Customer analytics tools allow businesses to track and measure KPIs related to CX, such as customer satisfaction scores, NPS, and churn rate. While you can measure these scores manually, specialized tools are available that speed up this process, and free up time to dedicate to other core business activities. 

Here are some tools to gather CX data:

• WEVO: Unlock meaningful customer insights faster with WEVO. It leverages both AI and human expertise to accurately test experiences and gather actionable feedback. 

• Google Analytics: Google Analytics is the go-to analytics tool for tracking the omnichannel customer experience. It offers detailed CX insights, including how customers move through your website and how user behavior changes as part of CX optimization activities.

• Funnelytics: Funnelytics helps map the customer journey, so you can better understand how customers move along the funnel and take action. You can pin-point friction points in your CX journey and identify optimization opportunities.

Even when using such tools, it’s important to stay up to date with customer analytics trends. Strive to understand the current market situation and how customer preferences are evolving over time.  

9. Implement changes based on your insights/data

Now comes the fun part: making targeted changes to improve CX based on all the data you’ve gathered so far!

Here’s how to approach it:

• Develop an action plan that outlines specific changes, initiatives, and strategies to implement.

• Allocate the resources, budget, and manpower to support implementation. For example, you may need a larger marketing budget, or a bigger team to support a feature update.

• Implement changes incrementally, rather than overhauling the entire customer experience at once. Start with small-scale pilots or tests (using WEVO, for instance) to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed changes before rolling them out more broadly.

• Communicate the upgrades to customers, employees, and stakeholders, highlighting how the improvements benefit them.

Design websites and products that users understand with WEVO

By measuring customer experience, you can understand customer preferences, pain-points, and satisfaction levels—to identify and prioritize areas of improvement in your business. 

The key is to track customer interaction at different touchpoints throughout their journey, and then follow CX best practices to take meaningful action from the data and research. 

WEVO is a top CX analytics tool to reveal customer sentiment and reactions to a specific product function or experience. While traditional survey methods like focus groups or usability studies are time-consuming and not completely reliable to test CX, WEVO gathers data points using a mix of AI and human analysis. 

Check out how WEVO can help you!