Free DownloadWhat is customer experience management (CEM or CXM)?
Positive customer experiences can boost both a company’s reputation and bottom line, but negative ones can have the opposite effect. Crafting and implementing a customer experience management strategy is essential. This guide explores techniques and tools that can help organizations construct and implement an effective customer experience management plan.
8 customer journey KPIs that businesses should track
To ensure CX teams properly track their customers' journeys, use KPIs such as churn and engagement rates to help inform what users enjoy and where they get stuck.
Customer journey mapping has proven to be a worthwhile investment of businesses' time and money.
Mapping tools are data-driven and visual, which lets an organization quickly get a detailed view of the entire customer journey. With this view, CX leaders can identify process shortcomings and streamline steps to increase sales and brand satisfaction. CX teams can also analyze the data to better predict customer trends that help a business make product or service pivots faster than its competition.
While organizations have hundreds of key performance indicators they can track and analyze, certain KPIs have proven more useful than others to help CX teams make critical decisions about their customer journey process.
Explore eight customer journey KPIs that businesses should keep a close eye on.
1. Impressions
Digital marketing and advertising can simplify how organizations track the number of times people have viewed a website, landing page or social media post. And, along a digital customer journey, CX teams can better track metadata containing information about each prospective customer.
CX teams can analyze the views and corresponding customer data to identify interest and fine-tune messaging to attract the largest audience possible.
While views and impressions are great, the next metric CX teams should closely follow is the click-through rate. The CTR is the ratio of the number of views a marketing campaign or advertisement has versus the number of people that actually click on a link to purchase a product or learn more about it.
To properly measure a customer journey map's success, CX teams must ensure each phase realistically aligns with the journey their customers will take.
3. Engagement rate
Understanding the health and popularity of a product or brand can reveal a great deal about whether an organization has properly marketed a product toward customers. Customer engagement rates track both positive and negative interactions between customers and the brand. CX teams can analyze these interactions to determine customers' levels of interest in a product or brand, and to identify and potentially remediate any negative experiences.
4. Cost per lead
Marketing and advertising can cost a lot or a little depending on the methods used. The goal of these campaigns is to generate leads, which are customers these teams have identified as showing interest in a product or service.
To track the cost of a particular campaign and map it against the number of qualified leads it generates, organizations can adopt customer journey tools. CX teams can then use these tools to validate whether a particular campaign led to leads -- and potential sales -- that either would or would not justify the cost of similar campaigns in the future.
5. Cost per conversion
While leads are great, the overall goal is to convert them into paying customers. Thus, CX teams must calculate the cost per conversion rate, which tracks the cost of a campaign divided by the number of people or businesses that ultimately opt to purchase a product or service.
In many cases, especially thanks to social media, click-through and engagement rates can be high while conversion rates remain stagnant. This information can help marketing and sales teams identify if they're simply making noise or helping successfully close a deal.
6. Customer satisfaction
Happy customers are the best customers. Positive experiences help guarantee repeat transactions, increase the overall customer lifetime value and create a loyal base that can help an organization promote its products or services and gain new referrals at a low cost.
Popular methods to gather customer satisfaction data include the following:
Targeted surveys.
Product and service reviews.
Tracking and monitoring of customer complaints.
Calculating customer loyalty based on net promoter score metrics.
7. Customer churn rate
Understanding why a customer stops using a product or service can be as valuable as monitoring how the organization gains new customers. Repeat customers can help businesses better predict growth opportunities.
CX teams can also use this information in conjunction with other data, such as customer satisfaction and engagement metrics, to see why customers leave. With that knowledge, teams can adjust their processes along the customer journey to lower the churn rate.
Most organizations want to meet customer expectations at the lowest cost to them. Tracking and analyzing churn rate helps calculate the amount of time and effort CX teams should spend to decrease this number.
8. Customer lifetime value
As mentioned previously, repeat customers are incredibly valuable to organizations. The cost of acquiring new customers often exceeds that of an active, existing customer.
However, CX teams should closely track the customer lifetime value of repeat purchasers to ensure the cost of long-term retention does not exceed the monetary value they deliver. CX teams should monitor customer lifetime values to ensure this ratio does not get out of balance.
Build a customer journey map to monitor KPIs
Data from customer journey KPIs means little without the right framework to monitor and analyze it in a reasonable amount of time.
A customer journey map and corresponding software-based tools can help CX teams collect and analyze data to create actionable items they can use to increase sales. In turn, an increase in sales translates into increased value for a business. This type of map creates a flexible and scalable foundation to track all customer interactions that organizations can use to identify new trends, markets and competitors.
