How to Select the Best CX KPIs

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CX KPIs quantify the success of your Customer Experience (CX) efforts. They can help you understand how well you cater to customer expectations and what to focus on to do better. When it comes to KPIs, the list is long, with C-SAT, EVI®, NPS, and CES dominating the realm. But do you need everything? Certainly not, especially if you are just starting to integrate them. However, you do need to choose the best ones for your business.

Here are some tips on how to select the best CX KPIs for your brand!

Define Clear Objectives

Start by identifying what you intend to measure in line with your business goals. The objectives may differ based on the size of your business, the type of product/service you offer, and the industry. But, being clear from the get-go will bring more clarity to the process and help you execute your strategies more effectively.

Consider what aspects of customer experience are more critical for your brand and integrate relevant KPIs accordingly. For example, a small business may consider survival as its primary objective and may intensively focus on customer retention and loyalty to establish itself. Here, metrics like EVI®, NPS, and customer retention are essential.

Choosing KPIs based on your business goals helps your team members focus, track, measure, and evaluate the data better. Also, it becomes easier to incorporate new KPIs along the way once you have mastered the existing ones.

Consider Your Customer Journey

Next, study your unique customer journey and your targeted customers. Identify prominent touchpoints in each stage and analyze how they contribute to the overall customer experience. It’s vital to align your KPIs with the customer journey to make it relevant for your audience. For example, if you run an eCommerce store, your targeted customers are online shoppers. Then, metrics like conversion rate, cart abandonment rate, and customer lifetime value (CLV) matter.

Also, it’s important to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement when analyzing the buying journey. You can then use KPIs that help you overcome these points of friction and create a seamless experience. Regardless of the nature of your business, EVI® is a great metric to measure your customer’s state of mind and pain points throughout a customer journey.

Balance Qualitative and Quantitative Insights

The primary objective of using KPIs is to gather data on customer experience and use it to leverage their buying journey further. In this regard, customer opinions and feedback matter as much as the big numbers delivered by KPIs. Therefore, when choosing the best CX KPIs, select ones that offer balanced qualitative and quantitative insights.

Metrics like C-SAT, NPS, and CES give you numerical data to help you gain a good overview of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and effort. However, qualitative efforts like sentimental analysis (EVI®), customer reviews, and feedback left on open-ended questions also play a role. They help brands identify the underlying emotions, opinions, and attitudes. They can provide the context to the issue in question and the emotional resonance of the client.

Prioritize Actionability and Relevance

Finally, it’s important to integrate KPIs that give you actionable insights to drive change and complement your business’s success. Avoid KPIs that are difficult to interpret or lack direct influence over CX enhancements. Go for metrics that can be directly linked to specific improvements and enable the business’s ability to deliver better experiences.

Besides incorporating relevant KPIs that support your goals, it’s also necessary to select simple, direct, and easy-to-measure KPIs that deliver value to your CX strategy. When it comes to improving the buying journey and the overall experience, it’s not just the CX team in charge. All the other teams should be on board with it too. So, select metrics that can empower your teams to take meaningful actions.

CX KPI Comparison Table

For further analysis in finding the KPI that will fit best your needs, please see the Customer Experience main KPIs comparison table below that describes the four most popular metrics measured in Customer Experience – Emotional Value Index (EVI®), Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS).