How to measure customer experience (CX) in contact centers

Customers remember truly great—and negative—brand experiences. Whether it’s a favorite restaurant staff member going the extra mile to make an anniversary dinner special or the frustration of navigating insurance claims after a kitchen flood, these moments stand out.

A business that delivers superior customer experiences gets loyal, brand-advocate customers in return. The converse is also true. 96% of customers say inadequate customer service experiences impact their loyalty to a brand, and 76% would abandon a brand after three negative service experiences.

Elevating the customer experience (CX) is crucial to success. The process starts with looking at key performance indicators (KPIs) and other quantifiable measurements for invaluable insights into contact center operations and customer satisfaction. These insights help a business understand its strengths, identify areas for improvement, and formulate effective strategies to enhance the customer journey.

The contact center serves as a significant point of interaction between customers and businesses, putting it at the heart of any CX strategy.

Measuring customer experience in a contact center: four strategies.

Measuring customer experience in a contact center is a continuous process that requires multiple strategies. It’s not a one-time task, but an ongoing effort to understand and improve customer interactions.

To get meaningful insights, a company should focus on four key strategies: tracking performance metrics, using customer satisfaction surveys, analyzing customer sentiment, and monitoring agent performance with quality assurance tools. These steps help a company meet customer expectations and make necessary adjustments.

Evaluate performance management metrics to track customer behaviors.

Performance management metrics provide quantifiable data to help a business assess its performance and make necessary improvements.

Real-time dashboards for CX analytics help an organization monitor the customer experience. These dashboards consolidate various metrics into a comprehensive view of critical aspects like response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction levels.

Features like real-time alerts, agent monitoring capabilities, and pre-built and customizable dashboards can help companies evaluate and improve the customer experience.

With real-time dashboards, decision-makers can:

• See KPIs in real time. Instantly track KPIs like abandonment rate, waiting time, service level, and handling time. Real-time visibility into performance allows swift responses to any fluctuations or emerging issues.

• Receive alerts. The best real-time dashboards automatically alert staff whenever specific thresholds are crossed or issues arise.

• Identify trends and spot potential issues. Dashboards can also analyze trends over time and spot anomalies, enabling the team to take action quickly and manage issues before they escalate and impact the customer experience.

• Make informed decisions. With all this information at its fingertips, an organization can make informed decisions to improve the customer experience as efficiently as possible.

Implement a customer satisfaction survey to learn what customers actually think.

The key to learning what customers really think is customer satisfaction surveys. These surveys measure CX metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter scores (NPS) and can shed light on whether or not the company’s products and services are meeting customer expectations.

Customer satisfaction surveys serve as a direct line to customers’ thoughts and feelings. To run a high-quality survey, an organization will need to:

• Define survey goals. Before creating the survey, an organization must consider what it would like to learn from it.

• Be brief. No one wants to take a never-ending survey, so it’s important to keep it short and to the point. Include less than ten questions to show respect for customers’ time.

• Include open-ended questions last. To gain deeper insights into customers’ experiences, include long, open-ended questions like “Would you recommend us to a friend?” or “How can we improve our services?” at the end of the survey.

• Don’t ask intrusive demographic questions. Demographic data offers valuable audience context but often at the expense of making customers uncomfortable.

• Use straightforward language. Make it easy for customers to understand what is being asked. Using complex wording can confuse respondents, causing them to give answers they don’t mean or skip the question altogether.

• Analyze and act on feedback. Collecting survey answers is a good start, but an organization needs to regularly analyze responses to identify trends and take action.

After designing a customer feedback survey, it’s time to distribute it using customer feedback survey solutions. These tools help with not only designing and distributing surveys but also analyzing them. With the help of a customer feedback survey solution, any organization can gain valuable insights from customers, allowing them to make strategic decisions, resolve issues promptly, and continually improve their customer service efforts.

Use interaction analytics for spot-on sentiment analysis.

Advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are transforming how organizations manage customer experience. These tools can analyze vast amounts of data and extract valuable insights, which makes them especially useful for powering interaction analytics capabilities like sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis specifically focuses on evaluating the tone, emotion, and context of customer interactions—whether they occur through phone calls, emails, chats, or social media. Sentiment analysis captures not just what customers say but how they feel during interactions. This deeper understanding of customer emotions enables a company to enhance its customer experience efforts, leading to more empathetic interactions, higher satisfaction, and improved customer retention.

Interaction analytics also identifies common themes and recurring issues in customer interactions, providing valuable insights to contact center managers. These insights help companies address specific pain points, improve processes, and provide targeted coaching for agents.

By leveraging these advanced tools, organizations can move from reactive to proactive customer experience management, addressing potential problems before they escalate and turning negative experiences into positive ones.

Adopt a quality assurance program to monitor internal agent performance.

While monitoring external customer metrics like CSAT and NPS is essential for understanding the customer experience, focusing solely on these metrics only tells half the story. To truly optimize contact center performance, it’s equally important to monitor internal agent metrics through a robust quality assurance program.

A quality assurance program helps ensure contact center operations meet the desired standards and deliver a consistent customer experience.

Internal agent KPIs worth tracking include:

• Average handle time: A high average handle time (the amount of time it takes for a business to answer and resolve a customer support request) can indicate poorly trained agents, inefficient systems and processes, a lack of quality management, a surge in complex customer inquiries, or too much after-contact work.

• After-contact work: After-contact work tracks the time agents spend completing tasks after the customer interaction has ended. Monitoring this helps identify inefficiencies and ensures that agents can manage their post-interaction duties without taking too long, which could impact overall productivity.

• Average wait time: This tracks how long customers wait before interacting with an agent. High wait times can signal poor agent efficiency or inadequate staffing levels, which may require attention to scheduling or workflow improvements.

• First contact resolution (FCR) rate: FCR measures the percentage of customer inquiries resolved during the first interaction. A low FCR rate indicates that agents may need better resources or training to resolve issues effectively in one call or contact.

Additionally, a company can evaluate agents efficiency and gain a better understanding of their operations by asking a few questions, such as:

• Is this issue a real-time, one-time problem, or is this a historical behavioral trend?

• Is the contact center team appropriately staffed at all times?

• Are agents utilizing their tools and systems effectively?

• Are agents adhering to compliance and company protocols?

To improve agent productivity, a company needs to concentrate on recruiting, training, and retaining agents. Not only does this mean setting clear expectations, promoting a healthy work-life balance, and rewarding high-performing agents, but also empowering agents with knowledge management systems and ongoing professional development.

Quality management software comes with features like evaluation forms, calibration sessions, and coaching plans to monitor agent performance, ensure consistency in evaluations, identify areas of improvement, and provide targeted coaching to agents. This enhances the quality of customer interactions and contributes to agent development and satisfaction.

Which CX metrics should a contact center track?

With so many metrics to track and agents to monitor, it’s all too easy for contact centers, especially busy ones, to get bogged down in the data. In fact, data can sometimes become more of a hindrance than a helpful tool.

While the exact list of KPIs might vary depending on the organization’s goals and operations, there are a few key metrics that typically apply across the board.

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) determines how well a company meets expectations.

CSAT is one of the most widely used metrics for measuring how well a company meets customer expectations with a specific interaction or the overall product or service. It is a critical indicator of overall contact center performance and should be measured regularly.

An organization can ask customers to rate their satisfaction level on a scale (usually from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10) to understand how well it’s meeting customer expectations and where it needs to improve. A company can also ask customers yes/no questions to determine if they were satisfied with the service they received or ask them to rank their satisfaction as unsatisfied, somewhat satisfied, or very satisfied.

Measuring CSAT offers real-time feedback that allows an organization to spring into action to rectify any negative experiences and improve the customer experience in the long run. It also enables an organization to identify specific problem areas and make targeted improvements.

CSAT surveys should be brief and use straightforward language. It’s also a good idea to incorporate a mix of quantitative questions like rating scales and qualitative or open-ended to gather both numerical data and more in-depth customer insights.

The survey also needs to ask the right questions. Vague or overly complex questions can lead to inaccurate or incomplete responses. Instead, aim for straightforward, concise questions that invite clear, actionable feedback. Using a customer survey feedback template can provide better results.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) forecasts revenue per buyer.

CLV is a key metric that predicts the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer throughout their relationship. CLB takes into account not only the customer’s initial purchase but also their future purchases, revenue value, and even the company’s predicted lifespan.

CLV helps forecast long-term revenue and offers a clearer picture of a customer’s worth over time. The company can then make more informed financial planning decisions, prioritize specific customer segments, and predict future revenue streams based on customer behavior. Having this understanding of revenue per buyer can also help a business design loyalty programs and personalized experiences that foster customer loyalty in those with the highest CLV.

Customer effort score (CES) measures how easily customers can contact a company.

CES is a measure of how easily customers can interact with a company, use a product or service, or resolve an issue. Lower scores indicate a smoother customer experience, which can foster loyalty and improve satisfaction since customers value a frictionless experience.

In addition to having a direct impact on customer loyalty, measuring CES can help identify specific pain points where customers struggle the most, allowing for targeted changes to create a smoother customer journey.

Customer service level (CSL) examines how accessible a company is to customers.

Both customer effort score and customer service level are vital metrics in understanding the overall customer experience, but they focus on different aspects. While customer effort score measures how easily customers can contact a company, customer service level is the percentage of contacts answered within a specific time frame.

CSL provides insight into efficiency and responsiveness. A high CSL reflects a company’s ability to be consistently accessible and responsive, which is critical for maintaining customer satisfaction and trust, especially in high-volume environments.

By monitoring CSL, a company can optimize staffing and streamline processes to meet customer demand. A good CSL can increase customer satisfaction, optimize operational efficiency, and improve brand reputation and loyalty.

Measure, and master, customer experience with Talkdesk.

Knowing how to measure customer experience is essential for any company striving to meet customer expectations and drive long-term loyalty. Once a company has collected and analyzed relevant customer experience metrics, it can take action to improve the customer experience and provide customers with the service they deserve.

Measuring important metrics like CES, CSAT, and CSL makes it possible to streamline operations, empower agents, and ensure that every interaction contributes to a positive, human-centered experience. CX isn’t just about solving problems; it’s about creating seamless, meaningful connections with customers that foster loyalty and boost brand reputation.

Ready to measure the customer experience and make every interaction count? Explore Talkdesk Customer Experience Analytics.