Tracking customer experience metrics might not be as dramatic as criminal profiling, but it’s just as important for solving a mystery—in the case of your product, the mystery of customer opinion.
Tracking customer experience is one of the most important functions of being a product manager. As you gather a greater amount of data and feedback across different customer personas, you’ll enhance your objective understanding of what users think your company is doing well and what can be improved. These insights help your company better meet collective customer needs, boosting user satisfaction and revenue.
However, you don’t want to just gather random user feedback and hope for the best. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with a mountain of data points to sort through and prioritize. To maximize your time and deliver the most value to the most users, you need to be strategic about what customer experience metrics you hone in on.
We recommend using the following four metrics as your foundation to create a clearer picture of customer sentiment. By zeroing in on these key categories, you can easily pull out recurring themes and identify what initiatives will give you the strongest return on investment for customer satisfaction—the key to lasting sales growth.
An NPS tells you the likelihood of customers referring your product, with higher numbers showing a higher referral possibility. Users submit scores through surveys, and the results are broken into three categories: detractors (0–6), passives (7–8), and promoters (9–10).
While your average NPS is a helpful benchmark for customer engagement and satisfaction, the real value comes from gaining insight into why customers chose their specific rating. These direct explanations are crucial to developing an accurate conception of how to better serve your customer base.
Get the most out of NPS surveys with these tips:
Post your survey across multiple feedback channels to mitigate response bias and get a better sense of how customers feel about your product. Let’s say you shared your survey with 100 customers, but only 20 people responded. If those 20 gave you a rating of 9 or 10, you’d have a high NPS score.
However, that low response rate leaves out 80 people who may have ranked your product much lower. This can make you think your product is doing better than it is, and customer problems slip through the cracks simply because you’re not engaging enough people. A multi-channel strategy will help you increase your sample size for better quality data.
Combine closed- and open-ended survey questions to dig into what people specifically like and dislike about your product and company. These targeted responses will give you a clear idea of what to do to improve customer satisfaction—which features you should promote, and which ones need to be adjusted.
Consider asking customers to rate different categories on a scale of 1 to 5. Then follow up with open-ended questions that are based on the initial rating that was given. For example:
In addition, briefly explain who receives customer feedback, how it’s applied, and how any changes your business makes will be communicated. This shows your company’s authenticity and responsiveness, which increases the likelihood that customers will respond.
When your product resonates with your customer base, you’ll naturally bring in more revenue and new users. To make sure your product continues to meet evolving customer needs, you need to continuously assess your product-market fit.
As Forbes Councils member Andrew Constable writes, “The key to successful product-market fit is adding value for your customer.” You can determine the objective value you’re bringing to the table by tracking the following data points over time:
This consistent, data-driven approach will give you concrete insights into what actually moves the needle on customer satisfaction. The last thing you want is to pour time and effort into features that actually hurt your product-market fit and lead to customer churn. Our product-market fit measurement guide will teach you how to easily calculate these key data points.
Product validation software is also helpful for continuously assessing your product-market fit. This tech allows you to gather feedback from end-users throughout the product lifecycle. Running things past customers in the planning, development, and launch stages will help you gauge your product-market fit and decide whether to move forward with a planned change or update. The more favorable the feedback is, the greater the product-market alignment.
Turn scattered user data into meaningful customer intelligence, guiding smarter decisions and creating a better product.
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