The Metrics of Customer Experience, Part 2: A framework for Customer Experience Measurement

The second part in a 7-part series on customer experience measurement, based on ideas and insights from Greg Kihlström’s recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience.

The following is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere. 

As we read in the previous article, a single metric like Net Promoter Score or CSAT doesn’t tell the full picture, and it isn’t prescriptive to all of the teams within your organization for how to improve customer experience along the entire customer journey. Because it is true that customer experience is everyone’s job in an organization, we need more holistic methods of measurement, analysis, and guidance or ideas for improvement.

The framework that I will be walking through in this chapter has been shared already in my previous book, The Center of Experience (2020), as well as with anyone who has seen one of my talks on return on experience. In the pages that follow in this chapter, I’m going to go into more detail about my customer experience measurement framework, and why I believe it is so valuable in order to get a fuller picture of the state of your CX.

We start with two primary categories, each with two subcategories underneath them, as shown below:

1. External (Customer)

   1. Quantitative

   2. Qualitative

2. Internal (Company)

   1. Product

   2. Process

As you can see, the main level categories are split into external, or customer metrics, and internal, or company metrics. Let’s take a look at these main categories, as well as why we split things in this way in the first place.

External and internal customer experience measurements

We will start our exploration of the dimensions of customer experience measurement with the two main categories and continue in the next four chapters by diving in deeper on the two subcategories within each one.

Customer metrics

External, or customer metrics, are most often directly gathered from interactions with consumers. These could be qualitative insights, such as those from a survey or focus group, or quantitative, such as return visits to a website, or purchases in a store. Regardless of the exact metric, they are all measurements that result from a customer taking an action. We will explore these in more detail in the chapters that follow as well.

Company metrics

Internal, or company metrics, can be thought of as more indirect measures of factors that make up a customer’s experience with a brand. We will explore these in more detail as well in the chapters that follow this one, and they include measurements of your products and their performance, as well as the internal processes you use in order to measure, analyze, and improve your organization’s performance as it relates to CX.

How this helps create better delivery of customer experience

By looking at your customer experience metrics according to a breakdown such as the one I am proposing, you are able to better separate the more explicit metrics, such as the ones you receive directly from customers, with more implicit ones, such as those that exist “behind the scenes” or may be more opaque to customers, yet still impede their overall satisfaction.

Customers don’t always know how to articulate their exact reasons for having a poor experience, and often systems, processes, and platforms don’t give them enough feedback or information to be able to share anything specific even if they wanted to. Approaching your customer experience measurement in this way allows you to look at both the surface interactions as well as what is happening beneath the surface to create either great or lackluster experiences.

The next four articles in this series are going to discuss each of the four subcategories in more detail and provide some ideas on how you can start to think more holistically about your customer experience measurement. You’ll quickly find that many of these measurements are not things you can look at in a silo, either. This is why it is so critical to get cross-departmental buy-in.

This article is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere.