What is a Customer Feedback Metric?

The use of metrics is a practice businesses apply to nearly all aspects of their organisation. Whether that’s finance, competition, customer requirements, expectations, employee performance, or marketing, metrics matter. Metrics reflect and support the strategies of these business areas, giving us leverage to improve in any way we can. So why would this be any different when collecting online customer feedback? And while we’re on the subject, what is a customer feedback metric?

Without metrics, customer feedback data can be messy. Imagine having a long string of open comments coming in from your website and mobile app visitors. Not only will this kind of data be difficult to sort through and categorise, but it will also be difficult to measure performance and change over time…

So what is a customer feedback metric?

Customer feedback metrics are measurement units that let us quantitatively assess our online customer feedback. Each metric usually covers a different area or type of feedback so that digital marketers can quickly and easily make sense of the feedback data before them.



For example, if you are looking to measure customer loyalty, a great metric to collect would be Net Promoter Score (or NPS). This feedback metric measures how likely your visitors are to recommend you to friends and family.

The benefits of using customer feedback metrics

Customer feedback metrics offer up a lot of benefits to the user, including:

• High response rate: It’s quick and easy for customers to submit feedback when it’s only a question or two, thus boosting the response rate of your feedback forms.
• Quantifies data for easy analysis: Unlike feedback in the form of open comments, customer feedback metrics can be placed into charts and dashboards making analysis a breeze.
• Reveals trends in your feedback: Thanks to the easy analysis, users can quickly identify trends, such as a dip in Net Promoter Score or a rise in Customer Effort Score.
• Easy to track progress: Once you’ve started making changes to online funnels and certain pages of your website / mobile app, you can continuously track the progress of your metrics and identify if your changes were effective.

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Customer feedback metrics you might want to try…

There are heaps of customer feedback metrics you can use within your feedback programme. However, some metrics are more suitable than others when you have a particular goal in mind.

Let’s take a look at 5 popular metrics used in feedback programmes:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
• Goal Completion Rate (GCR)
• Smileys / Star Ratings

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

One of the most famous metrics is Net Promoter Score (or NPS). NPS is a customer feedback metric that indicates how likely your customers are to recommend your business to others (including friends, family or colleagues). Typically visitors are presented with a scale from 0 – 10, with 0 – 6 being Detractors, 7 – 8 being Passives and 9 – 10 being Promoters. These groupings are helpful in tracking how loyal your customers are collectively.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score (or CES) is a customer feedback metric that measures how much effort it took your visitor to achieve their goal. It’s important to know when the levels of effort among customers (to achieve their goals) are high because more often than not, high effort results in lower customer loyalty. This is mainly attributed to the fact that if poor CX or usability forces your customer to expend more effort achieving their goal than expected, they’re much more likely to leave the website or mobile app.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction (or CSAT) is considered one of the top scoring methods and customer feedback metrics (along with NPS and CES) among businesses for measuring customer experience efforts. It is essentially a measurement of how well a webpage meets the expectations of your customer. To measure customer satisfaction, businesses may use either a CSAT number scale (1-10), agree/disagree scales, stars or smileys.

Goal Completion Rate (GCR)

Goal Completion Rate (or GCR) is a customer feedback metric that measures the number of visitors who have completed, partly completed or failed to complete a specific goal on a website or mobile app.This metric is ideal if the user’s goal is to improve online sales funnels as it provides a lot of insight into where customers are and are not successful.

Smileys / Star Ratings

Lastly, and perhaps one of the most simplistic of all customer feedback metrics are smileys and star ratings. These two are typically used for generic page rating, e.g. to measure the usability of a page. Alternatively, you can use number ranges, colour bars and even thumbs.



To learn more about where and how to collect these metrics, click here.

Start leveraging customer feedback metrics for real results

All of the metrics listed above have one thing in common: these metrics are actionable. You can use all five — NPS, CES, CSAT, GCR and Smileys/Star Ratings — to measure and make any necessary changes on your website or mobile app, whether those are design changes, fixing bugs, clarifying product content, and more. Also keep in mind that timing and relevance – when using these metrics – is imperative!