5 Ecommerce Customer Experience KPIs to Understand in 2024

If you’re looking for a helping hand in understanding which customer experience KPIs you need to focus on in your ecommerce store, we’re here to help.

? In this guide, we’ll walk you through the top 5 ecommerce customer experience KPIs, why you should track them, how to calculate them, and then how to improve them with some tips.

Understanding and improving customer experience KPIs can be the key to building a successful ecommerce business. 

Curious to know the KPIs we’re talking about? Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS).
3. Customer Retention Rate (CRR).
4. Customer Effort Score (CES).
5. Customer Churn Rate (CCR).

We’ll break them down, one after the other. By the end of it, you will have a comprehensive understanding of what they are, their benefits, and how to track and improve them. 

Let’s dive right into the 5 essential customer experience KPIs you should monitor in 2024. 

5 Ecommerce Customer Experience KPIs to track and monitor

Customer experience key performance indicators (or CX KPIs) are a set of key metrics that businesses track to evaluate their customer experience performance.

These CX metrics help businesses assess the quality of their relationship and customer interactions. They reveal how well your business performs but from a customer’s perspective.

Monitoring these metrics will give you valuable insights into the touchpoints of your ecommerce store that need improvements to improve customer experience. The improvements you make will also increase customer satisfaction. 

? Satisfied customers are the lifeblood of any successful product or service-based business. Studies show that satisfied customers are 140% more likely to spend more on a business than unsatisfied customers (Deloitte).

For this reason, keeping a close eye on these metrics can help to set up your business for success. 

Having said that, we can now look at these customer experience KPIs one after the other, starting with your customer satisfaction score.

KPI #1: Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a CX metric that measures the extent to which your products or services meet or surpass customer expectations. 

You can get information on customer satisfaction through customer survey questions asking customers to report their level of satisfaction with your business, product, or service.

You’ll typically ask customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 – 5 or 1 – 10, where the lowest number is “extremely dissatisfied,” and the highest is “very satisfied.” You can also include a short answer open-ended question asking them to explain their rating. 

This information will help you to calculate CSAT. 

Why should you track CSAT?

CSAT helps you assess how well customers receive your product or service. Calculating it enables you to gauge overall customer happiness and identify areas of improvement.  

A high CSAT score indicates that your customers are generally satisfied with your products, services, and overall experience. You can choose to maintain consistency or set higher goals for customer experience. 

On the other hand, a low CSAT score indicates the exact opposite – customers are unsatisfied. Fortunately, the answers that customers provide (in the short answer question section) will help you know the areas you need to improve to enhance customer experience. 

? Improving CSAT will enable you to retain more customers and foster customer loyalty. This is because 89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive experience (Salesforce). 

How to calculate CSAT

You can calculate CSAT using the results of the customer survey with this formula:

CSAT = Number of satisfied responses / Total responses x 100

Let’s say these were the options on the scale: 

1. Very Unsatisfied
2. Unsatisfied
3. Neutral 
4. Satisfied
5. Very Satisfied 

You’ll get the number of satisfied responses by adding those who rated customer satisfaction at 4 and 5. So if a total of 50 customers participated in the survey, and 10 selected 4 and 20 of them selected 5, this would be your CSAT:

After calculating your CSAT, you can implement various strategies to improve this customer experience KPI and reap its benefits. 

How to Improve CSAT

Improving CSAT is an ongoing process that requires a willingness to adapt to changing customer needs and expectations. This is why improving CSAT should start with consistently collecting customer feedback. 

Collect customer feedback

A simple but effective way to collect customer feedback is by using feedback boxes. But where do you place this feedback box on your online store?

In the same way physical stores place feedback boxes at the exit, you can place yours on the order confirmation page. This is where customers will likely have something to share about your business. 

Before you think about customers leaving feedback on the order confirmation page, you need first to ensure that they get there. You can do this by creating a good checkout flow using the Flux Checkout for WooCommerce plugin. 

Flux Checkout allows you to create a user-friendly multi-step checkout process that makes it easy for customers to complete a purchase. It also allows you to create a custom order confirmation page to serve various purposes – one of them being to collect customer feedback. 

To help you with collecting customer feedback, Flux has a custom content area on the order confirmation/thank you page. You can add any content you want to this section, including your customer feedback box. Customers can use this to share their thoughts post-purchase. 

Promptly address customer pain points

You can identify customer pain points from their feedback. These are areas of your ecommerce business where customers encounter difficulty, frustration, or dissatisfaction.

For instance, difficulty in finding certain groups of products, variations in the quality of products or services, or delayed responses.

Addressing these issues promptly will help to improve customer experience and satisfaction with your business.

Enhance product quality and customer support

Enhancing a product’s quality is one of the best ways to improve customer satisfaction. You can do this by minimizing its defects. For instance, if you’re a software vendor, you can fix any errors through updates. Alternatively, if you sell t-shirts, you can make them with better fabric so they’re durable. 

Improving customer support will also leave you with more satisfied customers. You can do this differently depending on where customers report a pain point. For example, faster response and resolution times, following up on resolutions, and so on. 

Now that you’ve improved CSAT and have satisfied customers, you can measure the likelihood that they will promote your business using the next customer experience KPI, NPS. 

KPI #2: Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS measures customer loyalty and how likely your customers are to bring in more potential customers through referrals. Despite being so simple, it is a powerful tool utilized by over 60% of companies globally. 

NPS is based on this one-question survey:

Based on the responses, customers can be classified into 3 categories:

• Promoters – will give a rating of 9 – 10. They are satisfied and loyal customers who will likely promote your business. 
• Passives – will give a rating of 7 – 8. They are satisfied but not enthusiastic and may not actively promote your business. 
• Detractors – will give a rating of 0 – 6. They are unsatisfied and not likely to promote your business. They might even be more likely to leave a negative review about it. 

The benefits of tracking and improving NPS

NPS provides a straightforward way to measure customer loyalty. It also gives you an insight into how likely your customers are to contribute to your business’s growth by either:

• Spending on your products or services over time. Gartner predicts that 80% of a business’s future revenue comes from 20% of its existing customers. 
• Referring your brand, products, or services to potential customers. 

This way, NPS predicts your business’s growth potential, and improving this metric can help your business grow faster. 

How to calculate NPS

Calculating NPS is as easy as subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters. 

NPS = % of Promoters – % of Detractors

You can use the responses from the survey to calculate this figure. So if you have 75% promoters and 34% detractors your NPS will be 41%. 41% is considered a great NPS score, and anything above 50% is amazing. 

What can you do to improve NPS? 

Improving this figure involves converting detractors and passives into promoters. Here’s how you can do it. 

Address negative feedback

Use the feedback from the surveys to address specific concerns that were mentioned by detractors or passives. For example, if they reported that your website is difficult to use, you can optimize your website’s usability and make it easy for customers to find products, complete purchases, and access information. 

Prioritize the improvements that could have the most significant impact on customer experience and satisfaction. 

Engage with promoters

Once you’ve identified your promoters, you can engage with them so that they promote your business further via word-of-mouth marketing. You could encourage them to do so by offering incentives such as discounts. You can even go further and convert them into affiliate partners. 

Up to now, we’ve been tracking customer experience KPIs that require customer feedback. We can also look at metrics that don’t need their feedback but are equally important. 

KPI #3: Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

CRR is a customer experience KPI that shows the percentage of customers that remain with your business over a set period of time. CRR measures the ability of your business to hold on to its existing customers. 

It is expressed as a percentage of customers who continuously engage with and buy from your online store after their initial purchase over a certain period. 

What are the benefits of tracking the customer retention rate?

CRR indicates your customers’ loyalty and how well your customer retention strategies are working. This is one of the most important metrics to track because it can help boost your revenue and grow your customer base.

According to research:

• Existing customers spend 67% more on a business than new customers. 
• It costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain existing customers. 

By keeping an eye on CRR, you’ll know whether your customer retention strategies are working well. If not, this customer experience metric can help you develop better retention strategies to retain more customers and encourage them to become loyal. 

Improving CRR enables you to create a win-win situation where you save on customer acquisition costs but still earn more revenue over time from retained customers. 

How to calculate CRR

You can calculate your retention rate using this simple formula:

Customer Retention Rate (CRR) = [(Customers at end of period – New customers during period) / Customers at start of period] x 100

This means that if you had 100 customers at the beginning of the month, you acquired 20 more during this period, and at the end of it you had 115, your CRR will be:

In this example, your CRR over one month is 95%. 

Strategies to Improve Your Customer Retention Rate

To improve CRR, you’ll need to give customers reasons to come back to buy from you and keep engaging with your business. Here are a few ways you can turn first-time buyers into loyal customers. 

Provide a seamless shopping experience

? A smooth shopping experience plays a crucial role in retaining customers, as 89% of customers will likely make another purchase after a positive experience.

For customers to have a seamless shopping experience on your ecommerce store, it should:

• Have a fast loading speed.
• Have a clear navigation menu.
• Be responsive.
• Most importantly – have a simple checkout process. 

With a simple checkout process, customers can complete purchases quickly and effortlessly. To create a simple checkout that encourages customers to buy from you again on your WooCommerce store, you’ll need Flux Checkout for WooCommerce. 

Flux Checkout allows customers to easily check out by replacing the default WooCommerce checkout with a streamlined multi-step checkout. Customers will have fewer fields to fill in and no distractions during checkout.

Address fields will be automatically filled in for them to minimize frustrations. Because it is mobile-optimized, customers won’t have any problems checking out on desktops or mobile phones. 

Deliver excellent customer service 

Helping customers find help when they need it on your online store can improve their experience with your business. Customers need you to be easily reachable, especially when encountering issues.

You can ensure they access your contact pages easily by adding a link that leads them to these pages using Flux Checkout. 

When it comes to delivering great customer service, Flux doesn’t miss. It allows you to add a ‘Need Help? Contact Us’ section on the order confirmation page and link it to your contact pages.

Suppose customers face problems post-purchase. They can use this section to reach out and get help. 

Allow customers to pick a date and time to receive deliveries

Show your customers that you’re committed to delivering excellent customer service by allowing them to pick a convenient date or time to receive deliveries or pickup orders from your premises. 

With WooCommerce Delivery Slots, you can give your customers the option to choose a convenient time slot for their delivery or pickup on your WooCommerce store.

You can create slots based on your availability and display them on any site page using a shortcode. You can also let your customers reserve a slot before they start shopping.

To ensure that you can handle all the orders without any delays or errors, this plugin lets you do two things:

• Limit the number of orders per time slot. 
• Block the dates when you are not offering delivery or pickup services. 

Doing this allows you to manage your workload efficiently and keep your customers happy with your service.

Improving customer service doesn’t just impact CRR. It also helps improve CES, the customer experience KPI we’ll look at next. 

KPI #4: Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer effort score measures the ease with which customers can interact with your business – especially its services. This includes how easy or difficult it is for issues to be resolved or to receive any other form of customer service.  

CES is a touchpoint metric. This means that the goal of tracking this metric is to understand how well a brand performs at a particular point of a customer’s journey, for instance, returning products that they bought. 

Why should you track CES? 

Customer effort is one of the biggest drivers of customer loyalty.

? A study done by Gartner revealed that 96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience. 

CES can help you to identify the touchpoints in your customer’s journey that need improvements. After identifying them, you can take action to improve them. 

Improving your CES involves reducing customer effort when they want to resolve an issue. This improves their overall experience with your business, encouraging them to transact with it again and be loyal to it. 

How to calculate CES

You can calculate your CES by administering a post-interaction survey (for example, after a customer successfully returns a product they bought). Then, ask customers to rate the ease of their experience on a scale of 1 to 7. 

Getting the percentage of customers who gave a 5 – 7 rating is the simplest way to calculate CES. 

NOTE: There are different ways to calculate this figure depending on your use case. You can get more precise answers using other methods, for example, adding up all the review responses and dividing them by the number of respondents.  

What are some strategies to improve CES?

To improve the CES score, you should make it easier for customers to complete tasks, resolve issues, and interact with your business. You can achieve this by: 

Simplifying and streamlining user experience

Streamline user experience throughout your customer’s journey, including post-purchase. You can ensure their after-purchase care is up to standard by improving their account pages and making support easy to find using WooCommerce Account Pages. 

WooCommerce Account Pages allows you to create and add custom pages and tabs to the ‘My Account’ area. You can leverage this to add user guides, an FAQ section, contact forms, coupon codes, and more. This way, customers will have everything they might need post-purchase in their account area. 

This plugin is integrated with WordPress, allowing you to create these pages and tabs easily like you would for any post or page in WordPress. 

Providing comprehensive FAQs and self-service options

You can also help customers find answers to their inquiries without contacting support by providing comprehensive FAQs and other self-service options. Your FAQ section should answer common questions clearly with step-by-step instructions and link external sources if necessary. 

It should also have clear categories and a search capability to allow them to navigate easily. To complement FAQs, include other self-service options like a knowledge base or a chatbot. 

Resolve issues efficiently 

Train your customer support team to respond to customer issues and support tickets promptly to reduce the average resolution time and take ownership of the issues raised. After careful consideration, they should come up with a variety of relevant solutions, and customers can pick what works best for them. 

After covering CES, we can look at another customer experience KPI that is the direct opposite of customer retention rate.

KPI #5: Customer Churn Rate (CCR)

Customer churn rate refers to the percentage of customers who stop doing business with your store during a specific period. It measures the rate customers stop buying products, unsubscribe from services, or discontinue their relationship with your ecommerce business. 

The benefits of tracking customer churn rate 

Tracking CCR has several benefits for a business because it provides insights into customer retention and loyalty. As such, it can be used to inform customer retention strategies. As an ecommerce store owner, you can use churn rate data to develop better retention strategies focusing on the areas that have the most significant impact on customer churn. 

Churn rate data can also help you identify why customers leave your business. After identifying these issues, you address them and improve customer experience. 

How can you calculate CCR? 

CCR has a similar calculation formula to the customer retention rate, and it goes like this:

CCR = (Number of customers at the start of the period – number of customers at the end of the period) / Customers at the start of the period x 100

So, if you had 1,000 customers at the beginning of July and 950 at the end of the month, this would be your CCR:

In this example, your CCR for the month of July would be 5%. 

How to minimize customer churn

This entails creating engaging experiences and giving customers reasons to return to your business. Here’s how you do it. 

Engage with customers through personalized content and offers

Creating a personalized experience is one of the most effective ways to retain customers. It boosts customer satisfaction and encourages them to become loyal to your brand.

You can deliver a personalized experience on your online store through personalized offers using Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce.

This WooCommerce cross-sell plugin is built to improve your average order value by offering customers personalized product recommendations.

Sales Booster allows you to display product recommendation popups based on the products in their carts, before and after they complete a purchase. 

It uses high-converting techniques like:

• Frequently bought together.
• Customers also bought.
• Order bumps at checkout.
• One-click cross-sell after checkout.

You can combine these techniques with irresistible offers to entice customers into adding the recommended products to their purchases. Sales Booster enables you to deliver personalized experiences while maximizing sales. 

Offer loyalty programs and incentives

Loyalty programs reward customers for their repeat purchases and ongoing engagement with your brand. These rewards could be incentives such as unique discounts, early access to products, free shipping, etc.

Rewards give customers a good reason to keep buying from you and engage with your business, as they will get something in return. 

Add a wishlist feature

You can also add a wishlist feature using the Wishlists for WooCommerce plugin. With this plugin, customers can create wishlists containing products they intend to buy in the future. They can add any single product, product variation, or grouped product.

Customers will keep your business top of mind, and when they want to buy, your store is the first place they’ll think of.

Track your ecommerce customer experience KPIs today

If you want to retain your current customers and grow your customer base, tracking your ecommerce customer experience KPIs should be a top priority.

Tracking customer experience through these KPIs is only the beginning. You’ll have to use them to identify issues with how your business delivers customer experiences. 

Then, use the strategies mentioned in this guide to improve these metrics and customer experience in general. We’ve covered several strategies, and implementing them can be daunting.

But don’t worry, you’ll have all the help you need from the plugins mentioned in this guide: 

• Flux Checkout for WooCommerce – to create a seamless checkout experience for your customers. 
• WooCommerce Delivery Slots – to allow customers to select a convenient time to receive their deliveries or pick up orders from your store. 
• WooCommerce Account Pages – to enhance after-purchase care for customers by providing useful resources in their account area. 
• Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce – to engage customers with personalized product recommendations. 
• Wishlists for WooCommerce – to allow customers to create wishlists of products they intend to buy in the future. 

Get them, one after the other above, or join our All Access Club and access all of them in a single purchase.