In today´s business world leaders on all levels rely on straight forward ways to explain the health, success and progress of their departments or businesses. A way to compare within a company and between companies are KPIs – Key performance indicators. How KPI driven is Client Experience? Which KPIs are relevant for let´s say a “soft” area like Client Experience? Which KPIs are key to show the essence of the area you want to see the progress in? Can Client Experience be driven “only” by KPIs?

My personal opinion is that – yes, KPIs are giving companies a framework to identify status and progress and to allow comparison between other companies. Specifically though when it comes to the “experience business” , be it with clients or employees or with a brand a KPI cannot be the only way of measuring. Equally important and insightful are the verbatims gathered as only they allow us to understand the gaps and the areas for improvement in the “experiences”. These verbatims can be clustered in themes and can be weighted by importance and impact and they will give the best starting point to understand where transformation needs to start in order to constantly improve the experience.

Let´s start with KPIs – we can distinguish 2 main categories of KPIs:

• KPIs that are directly related to the Experience as expressed by the clients (eg NPS, CES )
• KPIs that show the qualitative impact of Client Experience (eg Conversion rates, Support cases, churn, repetitive buyer rates etc)

Brand Loyalty – NPS

The best known KPI in the Client Experience world is NPS – Net Promoter Score. Bain who “invented” this KPI define NPS as ” a method of measuring customers’ loyalty by sorting them into promoters, passives and detractors “ – so Net Promoter Score is about understanding the client loyalty by asking the question how likely a client is to recommend … a product, another company etc to others. A client then has the possibility to provide a score of 0-10 which will determine the segment in which the client loyalty falls. Promoter (score 9 and 10), Detractor (score 0-6) and Passive (score 7 & 8) The question is very abstract and fits best when a company wants to understand the strength of the client relationship and the status of brand loyalty.

Simplicity to interact – CES

We are in the digital era where products are easily replaceable, where clients are self sufficient and autonomous to take their buying decisions. You can differentiate yourself from other companies by making it easy & resolution oriented for your clients to interact with you. I found that it is difficult to measure perceived simplicity of interacting with NPS . Even when you “beef up” the NPS feedback with additional questions on simplicity to work with a company it is not giving the depth of insight that is required for a company to learn and change.

A great KPI that can be used here is CES, the Customer Effort Score. As per Qualtrics ” Customer Effort Score (CES) is a single-item metric that measures how much effort a customer has to exert to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, a product purchased/returned or a question answered.” CES surveys typically ask “on a scale of ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult’, how easy was it to interact with … . This reflects the idea that client loyalty increases when a company is more approachable or easier to interact with.

A study shared by HBR reveils two important findings: ” First, delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does. Second, acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn. ”

KPIs impacted by Client Experience

Client experience is not only directly generating KPIs like NPS & CES as listed above. Client Experience can influence a variety of other KPIs that are not at first glance related to Client Experience. Churn, repeat purchase rates, Trial to purchase conversion rates are only a few samples where a good or bad Client Experience is showing impact. Support quality is another important indicator and a game changer.

In a nutshell

I would recommend to have Client Experience related KPIs integrated into the standard business dashboards. Don´t isolate them from business measurements as they are linked to them. Only when you can showcase the connectivity of performance indicators and CX status you will ensure the right focus. Show specifically the interconnections between financials and Client Experience related KPIs.

Don´t measure Client Experience solely via KPIs. Don´t stop here. You find the real transformational drivers – the why and how – in the verbatims. Read the verbatims regularly – daily. Have your ears very close to your clients. Cluster the themes raised by your clients and apply this insight in continuous improvement cycles. Only then you will turn your clients into Raving fans who will be loyal to you and come back again with pleasure.