Customer experience (CX): Definition, benefits, and resources to improve it

Customer experience (CX) is how customers perceive every interaction with your organization, encompassing every touchpoint, including your advertising, team, products, and more. These myriad interactions, numbering in the hundreds or even thousands, shape how customers feel about your business. Consequently, measuring customer experience is imperative for your organization, as it builds loyalty, fuels growth, and enhances profitability.

Keep reading to fully explore how to measure and improve customer experience, or skip ahead to one of these topics:

Let’s take a few steps back. As previously noted, customer experience (CX) is informed by the overall impression a customer has of your company based on all their interactions with you—from the first ad they see from your business to how you engage with seasoned customers.

Measuring and monitoring the customer experience will help you find obstacles in the customer journey. By improving CX, your customers will feel more satisfied, increasing revenue and boosting loyalty. 

The customer experience is one of the single most important aspects of running a business. Without customers, your company can’t generate profit or experience growth. Equally, if you only have unhappy customers, you’ll experience higher rates of churn.

Here are just a few of the benefits of a great customer experience:

Many statistics validate the importance of CX:

Yet, despite the vast range of benefits, only around 20% of companies have a comprehensive CX program. Most businesses still need more organizational support to improve the customer experience. 

To give clients what they’re looking for, you have to get systematic. You’ll need to continuously collect feedback from every customer, analyze their responses, and share them across the team so they can take action.

To measure customer experience successfully, you’ll need to be thoughtful about how you collect feedback and what questions you ask in your surveys. Companies use several ways to measure customer experience, each with its own set of pros and cons.

Surveys are a quick, easy, and efficient way of collecting customer data. By establishing a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, your company can begin to record a range of metrics that closely link to overall customer satisfaction. This program includes a range of useful surveys you can run to better understand the customer experience.

Surveys are some of the most common methods for measuring CX: one questionnaire can gather thousands of responses, making short work of measuring large groups of customers. 

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If you want to get detailed, in-depth feedback from the people you rely on for your business, there’s no better way than to talk to them directly. It may seem time-consuming, but direct contact with customers can be well worth it.

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One weakness to this strategy is that the customers most likely to want an interview will likely be your biggest supporters. Without a fair range of sample answers, you might miss out on key criticisms and areas of improvement.

Focus group discussions tend to be more free-form than surveys or direct interviews, which are usually scripted. You don’t even have to get everyone in the same room to have a focus group—you can hold the meetings over video conference or on the phone.

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These approaches to collecting feedback should complement your analysis of financial data points. These include your churn rate and your average customer lifetime value (CLV).

Due to the number of potential touchpoints a customer will have, it can be overwhelming to know where to start measuring CX. 

There are many different types of surveys to collect customer feedback at all critical touchpoints. When choosing which touchpoints to focus on, consider these important customer experience metrics. Below, we’ll explain how to measure and use each of them.

The most widely used customer experience metric is the Net Promoter Score. It helps understand everything from the likelihood that customers will churn to the chance they’re willing to buy additional products or services. NPS is the leading metric for determining customer loyalty. 

Your business can use different NPS types:

An NPS survey asks the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” But you can also apply it to products, services, or company interactions. 

Respondents select a rating from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest). Using the responses, you can calculate your NPS score, ranging from -100 to +100.

As the NPS score is benchmarkable, you can compare your business to others in your industry. 

Pro tip: If you use the NPS question in our Question Bank, SurveyMonkey will automatically calculate your score once the responses come back. 

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort the customer needs to exert to solve issues with your product or service. The idea is that the less friction customers experience with your product or service, the more likely they are to stay on and increase their level of spending. 

In general, CES evaluates specific types of experiences in the customer journey. These points are also known as “transactional touchpoints.” 

To evaluate your Customer Effort Score, you can ask, “[Your company] made it easy for me to handle my issue,” with the answer choices ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. You can then assign numerical values to each choice. For instance, “Strongly agree” can be a 1, “Agree” can be a 2, “Neither agree nor disagree” can be a 3, and so on.

You can then calculate your CES score from all of your answers, where a higher average rating reflects a higher level of effort for customers.

The CSAT score measures customers’ overall sentiment in relation to a product, company, or service. Instead of focusing on a specific element of the customer experience, like loyalty or effort, it attempts to get a holistic read of customers’ feelings about an issue. 

The most common way to ask about general customer satisfaction in a CSAT survey is to ask, “How would you rate your experience with our (fill in the blank)?” with the answer choices ranging from very satisfied to very dissatisfied. 

To get your CSAT score, take the number of satisfied customers (those who selected “very satisfied” and “satisfied”) and divide it by the total number of respondents. Then, multiply the fraction by 100 to give you a percentage. A higher percentage means that, all else equal, you have more satisfied customers!

Purchase feedback surveys measure satisfaction across your purchase experience. Considering that 82% of consumers have canceled a purchase due to a poor purchase experience, streamlining your transactions is vital. 

A purchase satisfaction survey will help you better understand how your customers feel about transactions with your business. By identifying pain points, you can enhance and streamline your purchase pathway. 

Transaction surveys use the Likert scale to allow respondents to select an opinion that closely matches their own. You can ask questions like “The price was fair” or “I was able to use my preferred payment method” with a range of options as responses. 

Collecting purchase data allows you to measure the effectiveness of your purchase process. Combining this with open-ended questions allows you to find areas you can improve upon to increase customer satisfaction and streamline sales.

Customer service surveys measure the performance of your customer service team. They assess whether your team can solve problems quickly and effectively. Customer service teams that help customers solve their problems contribute to higher rates of overall customer satisfaction.

Around 90% of consumers state that customer service is an important factor in their favorite brands. Monitoring and improving this metric over time can help enhance the customer experience and forge better customer relationships.

A customer service feedback survey will range from general questions about satisfaction with customer service to questions that assess whether the support agent solved the problem quickly.

Use the results from this service to identify issues with your customer support team and outline how to remedy them. As your customer service team improves, your customers will feel more supported by your business.

Event surveys measure attendee satisfaction after a webinar, forum, or in-person event. You can use the data from an event survey to determine how successful the event was and find areas where you can improve.

After hosting an event, these surveys will help you identify whether or not your customers were satisfied and felt like you organized the event well. Typically, an event feedback survey will ask questions like, “How friendly was the staff?” and “Was the event length too short, too long, or about right?”

Event survey data can help make your events better than ever. Collecting data and creating actionable insights from customer feedback will chart your pathway toward more effective events.

The customer experience your business offers impacts everything from your custom churn to your bottom line. With that in mind, improving CX should be at the top of your list of priorities.

Let’s explore how to improve customer experience in three simple steps.

Data is at the heart of every improvement your business can make. Using customer insight from data collection, you can pinpoint areas for positive iteration. But, if you want data to significantly impact your organization, you need to embed it into the workplace culture. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide to building a customer-centric culture in the workplace:

Creating a customer-centric culture allows your business to provide an enhanced customer experience. Prioritizing a data-first approach will empower your employees to give your customers the best possible service.

Every interaction with customers produces data. With a customer-centric culture at the helm of your organization, your employees will understand the value of turning this data into insight and action to improve. 

One of the most useful aspects of creating a data-driven culture is that you can track improvements over time. By continually collecting data and comparing it to previous samples, you’ll discover how your business is changing.

The more data you have, the more opportunities you have to benchmark your data. You can benchmark:

Customer satisfaction survey benchmarks are vital for monitoring your business's progress over time. They help quantify your positive improvements and demonstrate that you’re moving in the right direction. 

Collecting feedback is one thing; responding to it is another. One way of letting your customers know that you’re actively working on improving is to close the feedback loop. Where possible, reach out to customers who left feedback and let them know you’re taking their comments seriously.

Depending on the type of feedback you receive, you can respond differently. Here’s a quick guide:

Closing the feedback loop lets your customers know that their comments are important to your company. This customer experience strategy helps improve customer satisfaction, boost loyalty and customer advocacy, and create a feedback culture where individuals are more inclined to leave comments.

Related reading: How to follow up with NPS detractors, promoters, and passives

Running a customer feedback program involves several moving parts. If your company has only just begun to invest in your customer experience, it can seem overwhelming.

Here are some quick tips and resources you can use to get more information on how to effectively improve your customer experience:

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.