ABC's Customer Experience Metrics

A: Always define before measuring

The trickiest part of customer experience is its definition. That’s natural, though: customer experience is more about qualities than quantities. Experiences are subjective, hard to articulate, and as diverse and complex as your customers.
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. If it were, this post (and this blog, actually) would end right here. Fin. Finito! Yet it goes on. The lesson remains the same, though: if you plan on measuring anything, you better be certain that you know what a great customer experience looks like in your space. It will only be similar to other customer experiences in outcome: you must wow people. Getting there is the fun, hard, empathetic work that you must suffer through on your own.

B: Build outcome metrics, not action metrics

At Dreamforce 2012, there was an awesome panel on customer experience metrics that focused, among other things, on one insight: actions are easy to measure, but their easiness is deceitful.
Since action-based metrics are ones that focus on an action that an employee can directly and (usually) immediately perform, they get picked as priorities more often than not. They’re easy! But their results start to diverge from your overarching business goals, especially when you’re looking at something so multi-faceted as customer experience, which requires empathy more than hard-and-fast rules.
Customer experiences simply aren’t reducible to, and are sometimes not even connected to, action-based metrics like “how long did a call last?” or “how many people did you speak with today?” Instead, when Zappos picks a metric like “did the agent try twice to develop a personal connection with the caller?” it’s part of answering a larger, more complicated question: did the call create a ‘wow’ moment for the customer?
“Wow” moments are outcomes. To create them, there is no button you can press, no phrase you can memorize, and no amount of time that you must spend in order to get there. In fact, you could do everything in the list of action-based metrics that Zappos measures, and you still might end up without a positive customer experience result. So in an important way, they don't matter: as long as you’re improving the outcome (great customer experiences), you’re winning, so make sure you focus on metrics that show the true scoreboard of business success. The actions your organization has identified may just be part of the path to that success.

C: Create feedback loops

You’ve got your outcome-based metrics, and you’ve got your ideas of what customer experience means. Now it’s time to motivate, refine, and improve what's measured until you’ve got a business that customers won't forget. The first step? Get your management team driving the metrics up. Every supervisor has a role in organizing the whole company culture around customer-focused priorities.
The metrics help on both ends of a team: managers can monitor the metrics to give recommendations to lagging employees, and they can use them to build best practices from the best employees, who can be awarded for their awesome abilities.

Rebuild your company from the customer up

It might look a little like metrics are what this corporate vision gets built on, but nope, that's not the case at all.
The metrics are only as good as the customer experiences they help to build. Measures of success are like binoculars: they’re only helpful for navigating a rough sea if they’re pointed in the right direction. So know what you're looking at, make sure that the metrics are measuring things that matter, and make sure that the metrics matter to the people who make your company work.