4 Customer Experience Metrics to Add to Your Toolbox

Author: Dana Watson

In 2023, we brought you the Top 7 Customer Experience (CX) Metrics used by most companies. Have you already implemented these metrics and are looking for more? Are you ready to expand beyond the most common metrics? Below are four additional customer experience metrics for consideration and how to use them.

Social Listening Metrics

Social listening is all about identifying and assessing how often people are talking about your company online and parsing what they are saying. Social listening provides valuable insights that help businesses better understand their customers, track and manage brand reputation, identify and address opportunities or challenges in real time, and ultimately build stronger relationships with their customers.  

Potential social listening metrics to employ are tracking mentions, engagement (metrics such as likes, comments and shares), and brand sentiment analysis. There are a host of social listening tools available to automate the process, or you can manually monitor by checking social media sites frequently, setting up search engine alerts, and monitoring review sites or customer support forums specific to your industry. 

Referral Rate

Go beyond gathering an NPS score, which captures how likely a customer is to recommend a product or service, and measure if they actually did it by implementing a referral program and measuring referral rates.  

Customer referral rate is an important sales and marketing metric that provides insights into brand advocacy by calculating the percentage of new customers that came from referrals. Higher referral rates are typically the result of happy and loyal customers.  

Referrals are one of the most effective forms of marketing because they provide a low-cost source of leads. Research has also found that referred customers are more likely to make a purchase and have a higher lifetime value compared to customers acquired through other channels. 

Referral rate is the simple calculation of the number of customers that referred new customers divided by total number of customers. Measuring referral rate helps identify your most influential and engaged customers, rewarding them for their efforts and ultimately strengthening those customer relationships.

Time to Resolution 

Time to resolution, sometimes known as Average Resolution Time (ART) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), is an important customer service metric that can have a direct impact on overall customer experience. Customers expect quick and complete resolution of their issues, and these customer service interactions directly correlate with customer satisfaction and loyalty. Slow and ineffective customer resolution can lead to dissatisfied customers and, ultimately, customer churn.  

Time to resolution is measured as the average amount of time it takes to resolve a customer issue. While this can be a valuable customer service insight, it should be used in combination with other CX metrics such as NPS, First Contact Resolution, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to get the full picture.

Value Enhancement Score (VES)

Newer to the scene is the Value Enhancement Score (VES), introduced by Gartner in 2020, and is touted as ‘the best predictor of all dimensions of customer loyalty – customer retention, increased wallet share and positive word of mouth – compared to commonly used metrics.’ Unlike more traditional metrics like NPS and CSAT, VES is a leading indicator that more accurately predicts a customer’s future loyalty by shifting the focus from general satisfaction to understanding the enhanced value a customer derives after a customer service interaction. 

VES is measured as a two question, post-service survey. The questions evaluate the customer’s perception of 1) the ability to use the product or service and 2) confidence in their decision to purchase the product or service 

In Summary 

There are a few best practices to keep in mind when implementing these or any other CX metrics. First, it’s important to define your CX goals and objectives before identifying the best metrics to measure, as they must support these goals. Second, one customer experience metric will not tell a complete story. Use  a combination of CX metrics to gather  a holistic picture of overall customer experience.  

And finally, we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, the only wrong move a company can take with Customer Experience metrics is to not measure at all. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, so start with something and refine from there.  

To learn more about how RevGen can help you define the most important metrics to your organization, visit our Customer Experience page or contact one of our experts to discuss. 

Dana Watson is a manager at RevGen Partners with broad experience in business transformation, change enablement, and strategic planning. She is passionate about partnering with clients to help drive business value and improve customer experiences through transformation initiatives.