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7 customer experience metrics and KPIs recommended by CX professionals

Customer experience (CX) is the sum of every interaction a customer has with your brand, and is an important indicator of how likely they are to return or recommend you to others. 

This guide shows you how to measure and improve the top seven metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) CX professionals use to gauge how the customer experience improves—or worsens—over time and evaluate the success of product or business changes.

Summary

Customer experience metrics measure how easy, enjoyable, and useful customers find their experience with your business across the entire customer journey. Measuring and optimizing for improved customer experience results in increased customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. Kick off your successful CX program by tracking these seven crucial customer experience metrics:

  1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): measures user satisfaction with a product, website, or service that lets users rate their overall satisfaction on a scale of 1-5

  2. Customer effort score (CES): measures the amount of effort a customer has to exert to perform an action, rated on a scale from very difficult to very easy

  3. Net Promoter Score® (NPS®): measures customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others on a scale of 0 to 10

  4. Customer churn and retention rate: churn measures the percentage of customers who stop subscribing to or buying products from a company, while retention measures a business’s ability to keep its customers over time

  5. First response time (FRT): measures the average time it takes customer support teams to respond to a customer issue or request

  6. Average resolution time (ART): measures the average time it takes a customer success team to successfully resolve each customer support request

  7. Customer lifetime value (CLTV or LTV): a revenue metric popular with CX teams that measures the average revenue a customer is expected to bring to your company over time.

Improve the CX metrics that matter with Hotjar. Use Surveys to capture in-the-moment comments from customers and get the insights you need to create better experiences.

The top 7 customer experience metrics used by experts

Results from our survey of 2000 CX professionals, split by business maturity, rank the most important metrics as follows:

#The most popular CX metrics split by business maturity
The most popular CX metrics split by business maturity

Keep reading to learn how to use them to align teams across the company, develop empathy for customers, and focus on holistically improving their experience.

1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score is a simple measure of user satisfaction with a product, website, or service. A standard CSAT survey asks, “How satisfied were you with [product/website] today?” on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is very unsatisfied and 5 is very satisfied. 

Measure CSAT by asking customers how satisfied they are at a relevant part of the customer journey, for example on a purchase confirmation page or when a user is logging out.

➕ How to calculate CSAT: add up the number of 4 and 5 ratings, divide by the number of responses, and multiply by 100.

👉 Set up a CSAT survey in moments with our free survey template

🔥 If you’re using Hotjar: add a popover survey to any website page, and trigger CSAT follow-up questions if customers leave low ratings to find out why they aren’t satisfied. Not sure what to ask? Let our AI for Surveys feature generate questions for you. You can also collect CSAT responses from customers at any point in the user journey with the Hotjar Feedback widget—it's that little red tag to the right of this page. 👉

2. Customer effort score (CES)

Customer effort score measures the amount of effort a customer has to exert to perform an action (e.g. purchase a product, find information, or resolve a problem). CES is usually rated on a scale of 1 to 5 or 7, from very difficult to very easy. 

Measure CES by asking customers, “How easy was it for you to [insert action here]?” when they complete a key action, for example

  • After making a purchase

  • After using a service

  • After talking to customer support

You want CES to be as high as possible—a low customer effort score means customers find your website difficult to use or customer support unhelpful. Asking a follow-up question on low CES ratings will help you find out what’s holding customers back and adding friction to their journey.

👉 Set up a CES survey in moments with our free survey template

🔥 If you’re using Hotjar: sort your recordings by Frustration score to see sessions containing rage clicks (rapid, frustration-induced clicks or taps on certain elements) and u-turns (sessions where users quickly return to their previous page). These customers might be putting in a lot of unnecessary effort to get something done.

Sorting recordings by Frustration score surfaces sessions where customers had a less-than-stellar experience

3. Net Promoter Score® (NPS®)

Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty and satisfaction metric obtained by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others on a scale of 0 to 10. 

Collect NPS responses by asking the standard NPS question (“On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend us?”) after a customer has received delivery of a purchase or used a service for a reasonable amount of time (pro tip: don’t ask too soon, like we did!). 

➕ How to calculate NPS: categorize responses into detractors (0 to 6), passives (7 and 8), and promoters (9 and 10), and subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Or, take a shortcut with our free NPS calculator.

👉 Set up your own NPS survey in moments with our free survey template

💡 Pro tip: NPS is a useful (and popular) benchmark to help alert you to customer experience problems, but without follow-up questions, you won't be able to fix them. That's why when we set up our own NPS survey, we triggered relevant follow-up questions to find out more:

  • We asked those who scored 9 and 10 (i.e. our promoters): “We’re thrilled you feel that way. What’s the main reason for your score?”

  • We asked those who scored us less than 7 (i.e. our detractors): “What can we do to improve Hotjar… and your score?”

  • We asked everyone: “If we could do anything, what could we do to WOW you?”

Using our Slack integration, we send these responses to a dedicated channel so everyone can stay on top of customer sentiment. The responses to these follow-up questions help us plan our roadmap and make improvements to our product. 

Our dedicated Slack channel for NPS survey responses makes it easy to stay on top of customer satisfaction

4. Customer churn and retention

Customer churn rate measures the percentage of customers who stop subscribing to or buying products from a company. On the flip side, customer retention is a business’s ability to keep its customers over time. Every business's goal, regardless of size or industry, is to reduce churn and increase retention because—say it with us!—it’s more costly to acquire new customers than to sell to old ones. High churn and low retention rates indicate that something might be wrong with the customer experience, prompting customers to leave. 

➕ How to calculate customer churn and retention:

  • For SaaS and subscription businesses, monthly churn is calculated by dividing the number of customers who cancel in a month by the number of customers at the beginning of the month

  • For ecommerce businesses, retention is tracked using cohort analysis to group customers who made repeat purchases in a chosen time frame

👉 Set up your own B2B churn survey in moments with our free survey template

🔥 If you’re using Hotjar: combine responses from surveys with session replays from the Recordings tool to connect the dots between why individual customers say they churned (i.e. their B2B churn survey responses) and what they actually experienced (the session replay) while visiting your site. Use this insight to fix issues that affected your churn rate to see your retention rate improve.

5. First response time (FRT)

First response time is a customer service metric that measures the average time it takes customer support teams to respond to a customer issue or request. FRT can be measured in days or hours, depending on your business.

➕ How to calculate FRT: add up all first response times and divide the result by the number of customer issues received.

Hiring more customer support staff will likely shorten first response times, but another way to achieve the same outcome is to optimize your website or product to reduce the number of support requests you receive.

We did exactly that, focusing on optimizing our product in-house at Hotjar, and ended up doubling our self-service score (another CX metric that measures the ratio of customers who solve issues on their own compared to those who open support tickets). We achieved this by

  • Looking at session recordings, survey feedback, and support tickets to find out where users frequently got stuck

  • Improving support documentation, enabling customers to solve common and simple issues on their own

#A follow-up survey is triggered when users click 'No' (the article was not helpful) in Hotjar’s Help Center
A follow-up survey is triggered when users click 'No' (the article was not helpful) in Hotjar’s Help Center

 6. Average resolution time (ART)

Average resolution time is the average time it takes a customer success team to successfully resolve each customer support request. Like FRT, ART can be measured in days or hours.

➕ How to calculate ART: add up the total duration of all customer conversations and divide the result by the number of customer chats or tickets. 

Generally, the quicker the ART, the more likely a customer is to be satisfied and have enjoyed a positive experience with your service or product. 

7. Customer lifetime value (LTV)

Customer lifetime value is the average revenue a customer is expected to bring to your company over time. 

➕ How to calculate LTV:

  • For SaaS companies, LTV is measured by dividing monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by the total number of customer accounts, then dividing the result by user churn rate

  • For ecommerce, LTV is calculated by multiplying the average order value (AOV) by purchase frequency and estimated customer lifespan

LTV might first and foremost be considered a revenue metric, but it also represents customer loyalty and satisfaction. The happier your customers are, the more likely they are to buy from you again or stay subscribed. The result? Increased LTV and business revenue.

Start tracking better CX metrics

Now you know some of the top customer experience KPIs experts are using today, you need to pick the most relevant metrics for your business and get tracking. The easiest way we know to get started is to sign up for Hotjar (welcome! 👋) and use one of our free survey templates to build a CSAT, CES, churn, or NPS survey.

Improve the customer experience metrics that matter

Use tools like Hotjar Surveys and Recordings to capture in-the-moment comments from customers, see firsthand how they experience your website or product, and get the insights you need to improve CX.

Customer experience metric FAQs

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.