Why Your Customer Experience Metrics Are Lying to You

When customer experience (CX) is not coordinated with marketing efforts, customer trust erodes. To bridge silos and focus on meaningful engagement, businesses must re-evaluate the metrics they use to gauge the engage-ability of their strategies. Open rates and clickthrough rates are transactional in nature and do not map back to any well-defined business goals. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) have been a longstanding cornerstone in CX, but they are limited to that one instance and do not paint the full picture. Instead, Customer Engagement Value (CEV) should be used as it takes a full-frame view of the touchpoints and experiences from customer engagement efforts.

Open rates and clickthroughs are not a true indicator of a customer's intent and can create an echo chamber for marketers by inaccurately painting a positive picture. Opt-out rates are essential to measure because they are a true indicator of how many people are engaging with a business's outreach. NPS does not offer real insights and it is difficult to detect differences between respondents. CEV, on the other hand, accurately attributes value to customer engagement efforts and takes into account the total number of customers engaging, the high-value experiences (HVEs) being delivered, and the value attributed to those HVEs from a revenue and outcomes standpoint.

Businesses need to deploy an engagement strategy that reports back on actual outcomes rather than signals that may be spuriously correlated to outcomes. When they know the metrics to avoid, businesses can focus on CX and use the information they have at hand to re-engage those who are close to opting out. This piece examined three metrics commonly used in CX, including why marketing teams should consider whether those metrics are useful in analyzing outcome-driven engagement.