Measuring Customer Experience in 2022

Over the past few years, we have seen the Covid-19 pandemic accelerate digital adoption and push brands to fast track customer experience. Now well into 2022, brands are facing the risk of losing gains unless they continue to up their game, and put focus on effectively measuring and optimising for customer experience (CX).

Strategic digital marketing allows brands to capture quality traffic and bring them siteside, but quality customer experience is what closes the deal. At Reload, we aim to achieve a clear picture of customer experience by evaluating three types of CX metrics: interaction, perception, and outcome metrics.

Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester, states that understanding these metric types comes down to asking three simple questions:

• How good is the quality of our customers’ experiences?
• How can we improve the quality of our customers’ experiences?
• How will our organisation benefit from improving our customers’ experiences?

We chatted to our leading digital experts on the key customer experience metrics across each of these areas in 2022.

Examples of common customer interaction metrics:

• Conversion Rate
• First Response Time
• Page Load Speed
• Core Web Vitals
• Customer Effort Score
• Average Handling Time

The first place to look to measure customer experience is at key interaction metrics, and the data that shows what has actually happened during a customer experience.

“Most brands will already be monitoring key interaction metrics using digital analytics. Leading businesses are investing in customer-level data lakes that aggregate data on individual customers and leverage machine learning to build clear business cases for CX optimisation,” - Amy Scott, Reload Media’s Performance Marketing Director.

When investigating key interaction metrics, a focus on major interaction metrics like speed, convenience and correct information is a must.

In 2021, Google took a big step towards prioritising user experience on the web, introducing three new page experience focused rankings signals known as the Core Web Vitals (CWV).

Despite this, by the end of 2021, Searchmetrics was reporting that around 50% of the top 100 most visible websites on Google were still failing to deliver a ‘good’ page experience as defined by the search engine’s Core Web Vitals update.

“Collecting CX insights from a broad range of data sources such as analytics, heatmaps, session recordings and surveys is key to gaining a clearer understanding of customer behaviour patterns. Adding to this, Google has introduced the Core Web Vitals metrics as part of their Search Console offering. The metrics provide brands an opportunity for further insight into their customer experience, with field reports for users across both mobile and desktop.” – Michael Pesavento, Reload Media’s SEO Lead.

Examples of common customer perception metrics:

• CX Index
• Customer Service Satisfaction
• Customer Satisfaction Score
• Customer Effort Score

Businesses can invest millions into building a robust customer experience, but it’s all for naught if their actual customers don’t see the value. Perception metrics indicate how customers actually feel about their experience, making them the building blocks of personalisation.

Perception metrics are useful for measuring the viability of new ideas, allowing businesses to gain insight into customer sentiment before digital elements are altered and to test the feasibility of their CX strategy before going to market.

“Moving into 2022, the importance of zero-party data that customers have intentionally shared with brands is more valuable than ever for driving exceptional online experiences. Brands are increasingly leveraging robust customer profiles to unlock a fuller understanding of how customers are experiencing their website, what their barriers are and prove and disprove assumptions about their market,” - Natalie Hogan, Reload Consulting’s Market Research Consultant.

Examples of common customer outcome metrics:

• Customer Churn Rate
• Customer Retention Rate
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Average Order Value
• Cart Abandon Rate

Outcome metrics showcase exactly how businesses stand to benefit from optimising their customer experience, allowing businesses to see exactly what is (or isn’t) being left on the table.

Despite this, according to research by Forrester, seventy-one percent of CX professionals don’t quantify how CX improvements drive business metrics.

“Outcome metrics show ecommerce brands exactly what levers they can pull to get better results from their marketing. These metrics allow businesses to apply KPIs to their CX strategy, while interaction and perception metrics inform what the strategy should actually be,” - Jane Magoffin, Reload Media’s Ecommerce Lead.

The Future of CX

How brands approach CX has evolved significantly over the last five years, and it isn’t slowing down. Already we are seeing brands investing in advanced customer experience powered by predictive analytics.

Leading businesses are leveraging big data to analyse and predict customer experience, allowing them to make optimisations to CX elements that customers haven’t even engaged with yet.

Meanwhile, many organisations are still facing challenges with data availability and quality. Without this key piece of the pie, digital transformation is impossible.