By Bash Sarmiento

Measuring the customer experience is an important aspect of business, especially for businesses that value social interaction.  The difficulty that customers face with your products, the products they buy most, the services they ignore can all be gathered from measuring customer experience properly.

There are a lot of metrics users could use to measure the customer experience. Different survey methods provide different sets of data for your business to analyze and take advantage of. Today, we will be discussing the best ways to measure customer experience practically and effectively.

Customer Satisfaction Score

The most important metric, before anything else, is the customer satisfaction score. Regardless of how a customer feels about specific details of your business, you need to first know if your customer is happy with you. A customer’s happiness is always the priority of any business. The details can wait.

The best way to measure customer satisfaction is through a customer satisfaction survey. The short survey should be sent after they have used your product. For restaurants, this is usually immediate. For bartering businesses such as online transactions, a day or two once they’ve used the product is the best time to send them a survey.

Use familiar scoring methods such as a 1-10 scale or a 5-star scale for the customer’s sake. Once you have gathered all the surveys, take the overall sum of the scores then divide it by the number of respondents. The answer you get should prove to be a good measuring scale of how well your business is doing.

Example: 5 surveys with ratings of 7,8,7,10,6 respectively add up to 38. Divide 38 by 5, and the average satisfaction of your business is 7.6 out of 10. That’s the same score as the first Harry Potter movie on IMDB, so that’s pretty good.

Active Users (Monthly/Weekly/Daily)

Relatively straightforward, this is just a measurement of how many active users you have for your services or products over a set time. Depending on how frequent the use of your service/product is, you may adjust it to be monthly, weekly, or daily.

Daily is much handier for businesses such as restaurants or online games because they have “peak days” like weekends where finding out how many active users you have is crucial. Calculating this depends entirely on what kind of product you are offering. For sites, active use is how you set the criteria for users.

Example: If you notice that there’s a spike of users on Wednesdays, start investigating the factors as to why that is. Is there a school nearby with students who leave early that day? If that’s the case, add more features that cater to a students’ needs in your business.

Customer Retention Rate

One of the best ways you can improve customer experience is by analyzing the customer retention rate. This is the measurement of how long a business can maintain regular business with its customers. Retention is important because a high retention rate means a stable source of revenue. It’s also a sign that whatever your business is doing is effective.

Retention allows you to spot the benefits that your customers like most. To calculate this, you simply compare how many repeat customers you have over a specific period versus customers lost in the same period. Customer retention analysis is also handy for finding out how many customers are leaving your business.

Comparing the demographics of people who stay versus those who leave is also a good way to find out which markets you need to cater to. If most of your retained customers are people age 18-30 for example, look into what products that demographic feels is important.

Customer Referral Rate

Referrals are a good way to measure the positives of your business because it’s usually regular customers who start referring people to you. Referral rate not only shows how satisfied your customers are but also how confident your customers are in recommending your business and staking their word on it.

Offering bonuses to customers who successfully refer new customers to your business is a good way to get this metric. It’s relatively simple. Just take the total number of new customers who found your business through referrals. For example, if 12 out of 100 customers say they visited your business thanks to a friend, that’s a 12% referral rate.

Average Resolution Time

This is a measurement of how quickly your customer service teams resolve customer issues regularly. The efficiency of your support teams relies a lot on this particular metric because it provides a concrete example of their effectiveness. The average resolution time metric is directly tied with your customer’s satisfaction score.

To measure this, make sure your customer service team is consistent with recording support tickets. Add the total amount of time your team took to resolve issues over some time (let’s say, a week), then divide it by the number of tickets they received overall in the same period.

For example, 1000 minutes overall in a single week divided by 300 tickets means your team can resolve issues within 3 minutes.

Conclusion

There are a lot of other metrics that you could use to measure customer experience, but the ways listed here already cover most of the important broad strokes. A solid set of data to gather for customer experiences significantly improves your relationship with your customers moving forward.

However, never forget that all those numbers are people. Metrics aren’t supposed to reduce people to basic checkboxes, but to make businesses better understand the importance of their customer’s experience.

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