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. 

Focusing on the wrong metrics can lead to misaligned strategies and missed opportunities for growth, so 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 Your KPIs

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, you can leverage AI-driven sentiment analysis tools to quickly uncover emerging themes and shifts in perception, empowering you to act strategically at scale.

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 optimize. 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

Looking at individual KPIs in isolation can give you an incomplete picture and lead to optimization that undermines satisfaction, loyalty, or long-term value.

Reframing AHT: When Longer Is Better

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. A single rushed conversation that leaves issues unresolved can do even more harm than a longer interaction leading to dissatisfaction or even churn. 

And if your customers experience complex issues that require longer interactions to solve, agents should feel free to work through all avenues to resolve the issue rather than rushing to keep their AHT low.

Identifying What’s Driving Customer Churn

If churn rate spikes, you’ll need to investigate other metrics like AHT, CSAT, and CES to determine how and whether CX issues are driving customer loss. 

For example, if your churn rate increases but CSAT remains high and CES indicates low-effort interactions, the root cause may not be related to your customer support, but rather factors like pricing, market conditions, or a competitor’s new offering.

By analyzing metrics in context, you can uncover the bigger picture and make more informed decisions about how to address unexpected trends.

Take a Collaborative Approach

Rather than allowing your CX metrics to stay siloed, share them across teams for a holistic, full-lifecycle view. 

Each part of the customer journey, from conversion and onboarding to customer support and renewals, will have different goals and KPIs that matter most. But without a shared, holistic view of these metrics, you risk creating a fragmented experience that frustrates both customers and your internal teams.

The Risks of Siloed Metrics

Imagine a subscription-based SaaS business where the onboarding team focuses on quick sign-ups, the support team prioritizes reducing AHT, and the retention team measures churn. 

Without managing these metrics across teams, onboarding might rush customers through without ensuring they fully understand the product, support might prioritize speed over resolving issues thoroughly, and retention might lack the insights needed to address the true churn drivers. This disjointed approach impacts CX and creates internal inefficiencies.

Aligning KPIs Across the Customer Journey

By aligning your efforts across your organization to improve the entire customer journey, you can ensure a smoother, more cohesive experience.

Working with CX subject matter experts can provide invaluable insights and help you focus your efforts on the most impactful areas while still keeping the big picture in mind. 

The right partner can guide you in selecting and prioritizing KPIs that align with your business goals and customer needs throughout the entire customer journey 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 flexible, tech-enabled, 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.