The key to having a successful business lies in offering a positive experience for your customers, both prospective and existing.

A lot of company owners make the mistake of only measuring their sales and profits, but these can be hugely impacted by how happy your customers are. So, you also need to be making a conscious effort to measure the customer experience that your business provides.

But what is the customer experience? It’s slightly different to the customer journey, as it’s less about the touchpoints people hit on their way to making a purchase and more about how they feel throughout the process. And it doesn’t end when someone spends money with you, either, as the customer experience also concerns how someone is treated post-purchase and how connected they feel to your brand in general.

In this article, I’m going to take you through five ways you can measure the customer experience your company and website provide, so you can ensure you’re doing all you can to keep your clients happy.

Calculate your net promoter score

A net promoter score (NPS) is a metric ranging from -100 to +100, and it’s used to measure how likely customers are to recommend a business to others. It can be great for giving you an idea of your customers’ levels of loyalty and satisfaction.

To work out your NPS, send out a survey to your existing customers and ask one question — “On a scale of 0-10, how likely would you be to recommend [your company name] to family, friends, or colleagues?

Customers that give you a score of 6 or below will be Detractors, those who give you a 7 or 8 will be Passives, and those that say 9 or 10 will be Promoters.

Work out which percentage of responses fall into each category, and then subtract your percentage of Detractors away from the percentage of Promoters.

For instance, if 50% of your responses were 9 or 10s, and 20% were 6s or below, you’ll calculate 50%-20%, which gives you 30%. Any result over 0 is good, anything over 20 is favorable, and over 50 is excellent.

This metric is extremely beneficial as it provides some much-needed insight into how customers view your business and lets you know if you need to be doing more than you currently are to improve the customer experience you provide.

Ask your customers for feedback

One of the most effective ways to understand your audience is by speaking to them directly. And there is so much information you can uncover by simply asking them questions about their experience with your brand.

Surveys are not only used to calculate your NPS. You can also use polls or other surveys to get feedback from your customers on how your business is satisfying their needs.

You could ask them how they found your business, what the experience of buying from you was like, and whether they have any requests for future products or features that they would like to see from your brand.

Here are some tips that will help you get the most useful information from a customer feedback survey:

*Ask close-ended questions: *Most people find it easier to fill out surveys when they only have to choose between yes or no answers, so try to make sure that you keep this in mind when creating yours.

*Include an optional comment box: *On the other hand, some people might prefer to give detailed feedback about their experience. You don’t want to miss out on this information, so I would also advise you to include an optional comment box for the people who want to leave additional comments about their experiences.

*Ask relevant questions: *When creating your feedback survey, always ask relevant questions that relate to your business. Don’t ask general questions, but stick to specific ones about the products and services you provide. That way, you will get feedback that is applicable to your business.

Analyze your customer journey analytics

Customer journey analytics provide you with data that relates to how people have interacted with your business. They should show you where a lot of your customers find you, what kinds of pages they frequent on your website, and where they might encounter roadblocks that deter them from making a purchase.

By collecting and analyzing customer journey analytics for your business, you can identify where any changes need to be made to improve the customer experience you currently provide. For example, are you targeting the right keywords, using the best social media platforms, and making it as easy as possible for people to find the information they need?

But, before you can do this, you’ll need to devise a customer journey map that outlines the steps customers typically take from becoming aware of your business to spending their money with you.

If your business doesn’t already have one, here’s how you can create a journey map.

Choose objectives for your journey map: To ensure you get the most out of your journey map, you should set out what you want to learn from it first. You might want to learn which social media platforms deserve the most attention from you, where customers tend to drop off, or whether there are any communication channels people aren’t utilizing.

*Identify your buyer persona: *Creating buyer personas will help you understand who your customers are. Buyer personas are fictional characters created by companies to understand how the customer thinks and why they take the steps they do.

*List buyer touchpoints: *Buyer touchpoints are the encounters that prospective customers have with your brand while in the process of making a purchase. This could be your customer service team for inquiries, your sales team when prospects are ready to buy your product or services, or even your social media channels.

Identify common customer pain points: These are the common issues that your customers might face when interacting with your business. For example, they might find your shipping costs are too high or your website might not be accessible enough.

*Fix the roadblocks: *Once you’ve identified customer touchpoints, their needs, and the roadblocks in their way, you can improve on your processes to make things better and create a seamless experience for people who are going to come in contact with your brand. But, to work out which areas need your attention, you’ll need to analyze your customer journey analytics.

Look at things like where most of your customers come from — do they typically stumble across your business through search engines, do you get most of your interest from social media, or are paid ads your biggest driver of website traffic?

You should also assess how people like to get in touch, and whether your customer service team currently does a good enough job of addressing questions and concerns. You’ll be able to tell this by looking at whether people who get in touch tend to go on to make a purchase.

You need to look at which of your web pages people typically land on, and how they navigate your website, too. If you’re getting a lot of traffic but not enough sales, you could find the answer here. Are there not enough links to your products in your blog posts, is your navigation confusing, or is the overall user experience of your website not good enough? These are all problems you can identify by monitoring and analyzing your customer journey analytics.

Monitor your customer churn rate

Your customer churn rate describes the rate at which customers stop interacting with your brand or buying your products or services.

You can calculate your churn rate with this simple formula:

Number of churned customers / total number of customers in a particular period

So, for example, if you wanted to calculate your churn rate for 2020, you would divide the number of customers you lost throughout the year by the overall number of customers you had. Say 5,000 people spent their money with you in 2020, but 500 of them stopped using your products or services at some point — the maths would be 500/5,000 to give you a customer churn rate of 10% for 2020.

The lower your customer churn rate, the better it is.

There are a whole host of factors that could affect your churn rate. Someone might no longer have a use for your products, they might have found an alternative they prefer, or you might have made changes to your features or prices that have deterred people from shopping with you again.

It’s rarely obvious why someone might have stopped spending their money with you, but you’ll want to try and work this out if you want to provide a better customer experience for future customers. So, consider how you could approach past customers for feedback that will help you get your churn rate down. Could you send a post-purchase survey, poll your customers on social media, or add a feedback box to your cancellation page? The more information you can collect, the better informed you’ll be. And you can use this information to improve your customer experience.

Listen closely to customer questions and complaints

If you’re getting a lot of the same customer questions and complaints, this could suggest there’s a problem with the customer experience you’re providing. You should train your customer service team to look out for common problems and report any that indicate issues that need to be addressed.

You should also make sure that your customers have multiple means of reaching you, whether that’s via email, on a call, or through in-person visits to your office. Your customers need to know that they have access to your customer service team or support team whenever they need them.

The quality of your customer service can have a huge impact on you securing new business, as well as retaining your customers. So, it’s well worth monitoring your success with this and improving your processes if you ever see any indication that you might be missing the mark. If you’re getting a lot of the same questions and complaints over and over again, this is a sign that you could be offering a better customer experience, so listen to the feedback and act on it as soon as possible.

Summary

Measuring the customer experience is perhaps one of the best things you can do for your business. This is because it allows you access to raw, unfiltered feedback from customers who are actively using your products and services. Once you have this information, it becomes easier for you to start implementing changes that will give your existing and future customers a much better experience.

It’s also essential for you to monitor your clients’ journey with your brand and understand the analytics relating to each stage of the sales funnel so you can find ways of optimizing your business even further.