A data-driven approach to understanding and improving the customer experience is critical to company health. But ironically, the proliferation of customer experience (CX) metrics is making the practice of doing so more challenging. At a large organization, metrics may number in the hundreds — so many that it is difficult to manage them, apply insights from them across the whole customer journey, and communicate what they mean to top executives.

Today, a typical customer receives a CX survey within minutes of checking out of a hotel, ordering a product, or contacting a service center. What began with simple satisfaction surveys and customer interviews has evolved into a complex system of metrics encompassing customer perceptions (measures of customers’ feelings), operational indicators (measures of how well the company’s CX-related processes work), and financial outcomes (such as sales, profits, and market share). Companies often collect specific metrics because the measurements are well known or commonly tracked within their industry, without carefully considering whether they are relevant to improving their customers’ experience.

As a result, effectively using the plethora of CX metrics being collected is becoming increasingly challenging for managers. We will explain how to create more efficient and effective CX management programs by eliminating low-value metrics and mapping a smaller set of key CX metrics across the customer journey. Those practices emerged from our consulting work with a group of 14 companies in the subscription services sector that had come together to share data and practices. Our insights are also grounded in our experience and our review of the existing literature.

Managing CX Metrics Overload

According to research firm Gartner, most large companies use more than 50 CX metrics — with some using as many as 200 — with various metrics managed by different people in different parts of the organization.1 Among the 14 subscription services companies we observed, we found that across channels — call centers, chat, web pages, email, and brick-and-mortar retail locations — all of them employed multiple measures of CX performance, totaling well over 100 CX metrics used within the industry. Collecting, compiling, and analyzing the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual data measurements required extensive human and financial resources.