Customer experience (CX) metrics are indispensable tools for businesses aiming to thrive in 2025. These metrics provide actionable insights into how clients perceive your brand and interact with your service, allowing you to refine processes, enhance satisfaction, and maintain a competitive edge.
However, not all metrics are created equal. Identifying and focusing on the right ones can differentiate your business, while relying on surface-level data may leave you falling behind competitors.
Below, we identify five important CX metrics that organizations should consider tracking to build client satisfaction and sustained growth.
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS measures customer loyalty and the likelihood of individuals positively referring your company to others. Businesses value NPS because it measures two critical concepts - loyalty and advocacy. While advocacy drives significant organic growth and is a cost-effective means of acquiring new customers, long-term loyalty is essential to success. Retaining customers is approximately five to ten times cheaper than acquiring new ones and existing customers spend 67% more with your business.
To measure NPS, businesses ask clients: “How likely are you to recommend our business on a scale of 0-10?” Responses are categorized into three groups:
-
Promoters: Clients who respond 9-10.
-
Passives: Clients who respond 7-8.
-
Detractors: Clients who respond 0-6.
Your NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Passives are excluded from the calculation.
While an NPS above 50 is considered excellent, those brands hitting 70+ are considered world-class. To target this, identify low-scoring clients and address their pain points. Recurrent issues across multiple customers should be your top priority.
2. Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES measures how easy it is for customers to interact with your business or complete specific tasks. It is an important metric because high-effort experiences frustrate customers, increase churn, and reduce satisfaction. Coupled with customer satisfaction scores, CES provides insight into loyalty.
To measure CES, ask respondents to rate the ease of their experience on a scale and calculate the average score. For a percentage score, divide the number of customers who found their experience easy by the total number of respondents.
Use CES to identify high-friction areas in the client journey and resolve them. For example, integrate CES feedback questions into processes like purchasing, returns, or support. If CES scores are low for a specific process, focus on improving that area.
3. Customer Churn Rate
Customer Churn Rate measures the percentage of customers who stop doing business with you after a certain amount of time. The way organizations measure this varies significantly as the preferred time period and definition of “stops doing business with” differ from business to business and industry to industry. For instance, losing a customer could mean a canceled contract in a utility company, or in retail it could mean a customer fails to make a purchase within a set time frame. That time frame could be a month or a year, depending on your business model and typical customer behavior.
To calculate the churn rate, we divide the number of lost customers by the total number of customers in any given period. We then multiply the answer by 100 to get a percentage figure. In many industries, a Customer Churn Rate of less than 5% is considered healthy. However, this is highly industry-dependent, and some sectors will see much higher churn rates.
Churn rates can be used to identify customer retention trends and use predictive analytics to engage with at-risk customers, directing personalized outreach to them that could prevent them from leaving.
4. First Contact Resolution (FCR)
FCR measures the percentage of customer issues resolved in the first interaction. As such, it offers a useful insight into how efficient your customer support is and provides valuable action points that can proactively tackle customer frustrations. It can also reduce operational costs by limiting the interactions required to solve customer issues.
To calculate FCR, you divide the number of inquiries resolved at first contact by the total number of inquiries. You then multiply the answer by 100. Organizations should aim for an FCR of around 70-75% or higher. For best-in-class organizations, rates can exceed 85%.
FCR is a useful metric to help identify inefficiencies in customer support and make better use of self-serve channels.
5. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Finally, CLV measures the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire span of their relationship. CLV helps you understand the long-term value of loyalty and tailor offerings to high-value customer segments. It can help focus marketing efforts and ensure you maximize the returns on your marketing and customer support investments.
In most cases, CLV is calculated by multiplying the average sale value by the average number of sales in a year and then multiplying the answer by the average customer lifespan in years. You can perform this for different customer segments to achieve a more granular view of your customers and prioritize high-value individuals by targeting them with personalized experiences, loyalty rewards, and proactive service.
Tracking metrics with EDC tools
EDC’s Customer Experience Management solutions enable you to track key CX metrics, providing up-to-date insights into how your business is performing. These solutions also help to design and implement interventions that eliminate friction in the customer journey and improve the customer experience. From accurately mapping and refining the customer journey to managing customer communications and personalizing outreach, EDC’s CEM solutions provide you with the information you need and the means to act on it.
