Most Important Customer Experience KPIs in the Hospitality Industry

Businesses have become more and more focused on creating positive customer experiences. But what does that really mean? You may hear terms like Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Success (CS) and they may even be used interchangeably — but they represent distinct approaches with different goals and strategies. It is important to understand the differences between customer experience and customer success and learn how to develop effective customer-focused strategies. boostCX offers powerful customer experience management tools that can be tailored to fit various industries — including automotive, financial, retail, and more — helping you achieve success in both areas.‍

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Customer Experience (CX) vs. Customer Success (CS)

While both CX and CS focus on creating positive experiences for customers, they have distinct approaches and goals. CX aims to create positive and engaging experiences across all touchpoints to foster satisfaction and loyalty. CS focuses on helping customers achieve their desired outcomes using a company's product or service. 

‍Customer Experience — CX encompasses all interactions a customer has with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. It focuses on creating positive and engaging experiences across all touchpoints to foster satisfaction and loyalty.

‍Customer Success — CS is about partnering with customers to help them achieve their goals and extract maximum value from the products or services you have to offer. It's a proactive approach that focuses on guiding customers towards success and gaining value from their relationship with your business.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Success: Areas of Focus

Customer experience strategies cast a wider net than customer success, creating positive impressions at every stage of the customer journey, from initial awareness and interactions with your brand to their post-purchase experience and beyond. It's about crafting a seamless and enjoyable overall experience at every step along the way. Customer success adopts a more targeted strategy, focusing on helping customers achieve specific goals and maximize the value they receive from your product or service. This may include providing proactive guidance, personalized support, and resources that empower customers to successfully utilize your products or services.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Success: Strategy

CX strategies often involve mapping the customer journey, identifying pain points, and implementing improvements to enhance customer satisfaction. This approach helps streamline processes, improve communication, or personalize interactions to create a more seamless and enjoyable experience for customers. CS strategies focus on providing the support and resources customers need to successfully utilize a product or service and achieve a specific outcome. This could include onboarding programs, training materials, ongoing support channels, and proactive guidance for customers.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Success: Customer Relationships

CX strategies aim to build positive relationships and create connections between your brand and your customers. This involves creating a consistent and enjoyable experience across all facets of the business, from the initial interaction to post-purchase support. It's about making customers feel valued and appreciated at every touchpoint, so they become repeat buyers and brand advocates. CS involves developing deeper relationships with key customer segments after they have made a purchase, providing personalized support and guidance to help ensure their success. This might involve assigning dedicated customer success managers or offering tailored onboarding programs.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Success: KPIs

CX Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) often include metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer acquisition rate, customer conversion rate, and customer churn rate. These metrics measure how satisfied customers are with their overall experience and how likely they are to recommend your brand to others. The KPIs analyzed with a customer success strategy focus on metrics like customer lifetime value (CLTV), customer retention rate, customer effort score (CES), and repeat purchase rate. These metrics measure how successful customers are in achieving their desired outcomes using your product or service.

‍READ MORE: Top 25 Stats that Show the Value of Customer Experience‍

When you are looking at ways to improve your business processes, it is important to understand the differences between customer experience and customer success. While they represent different approaches, they are complementary and essential for building a successful and customer-focused business.‍

Contact boostCX today to learn how our solutions can help you excel in both customer experience and customer success!

When you examine customer experience management (CXM), it is critical that you understand customer loyalty. Net Promoter Score (NPS) may be the most widely adopted Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for measuring customer loyalty.

NPS quantifies a customer's willingness to recommend your company, product, or service to a friend or colleague, based on their response to a single question - On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend? This simple metric helps businesses categorize customers into Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6) based on their responses and provides a clear indicator of overall sentiment and potential for growth.

When you go more in-depth into this KPI, understanding the differences between Transactional and Relational Net Promoter Scores is a key to better leveraging this powerful metric effectively across different aspects of your business.

Transactional NPS vs. Relational NPS

While both types of NPS measure customer loyalty, they serve distinct purposes and are implemented at different stages of the customer journey:

• Relational NPS (rNPS): This type of NPS survey is designed to measure a customer's overall loyalty and satisfaction with your company or brand as a whole. In most cases, it is conducted at regular intervals, such as quarterly or annually, or after a significant period of customer loyalty. Relational NPS provides a high-level view of the long-term health of your customer relationships and perception of your brand.
• Transactional NPS (tNPS): By comparison, Transactional NPS measures customer satisfaction and loyalty immediately after a specific interaction, transaction, or customer touchpoint. This could be after a purchase, a customer service call, an online order, a product installation, or a visit to your retail store. tNPS is an event-based metric and provides immediate, in-depth feedback on specific experiences your customers have had.

Why You Should Track Relational NPS?

Relational NPS offers a broader, more comprehensive view of customer loyalty and the overall health of your brand. It can measure long-term customer sentiment and can be a strong predictor of future business growth, customer churn, and customer lifetime value. Here is a better look at a few key reasons you should consider tracking Relational NPS:

• Gauge Overall Brand Loyalty: rNPS measures the strength of the customer's entire relationship with your brand, not a single interaction, and reflects cumulative experiences. Annual Relational NPS surveys help to understand overall customer loyalty and track how it is trending year-over-year.
• Predict Future Growth and Customer Churn: Higher Relational NPS scores can correlate with increased customer retention, more repeat purchases, and a higher number of positive referrals, which all point to long-term growth. A subscription-based streaming service could track Relational NPS quarterly and gain insight on declining trends that can signal an increased risk of customer churn.
• Make Strategic Decisions: This data helps identify broad areas for strategic focus to improve the overall customer relationship, brand perception, and long-term strategy. A car manufacturer might use Relational NPS feedback to understand how its brand is perceived overall and use the data to influence long-term product development and marketing strategies.
• Benchmark Against Competitors: Relational NPS is a common metric for businesses and it can allow for general benchmarking against competitors to help understand your position in terms of customer loyalty. A tech company might compare its Relational NPS to published industry averages to see how its overall customer loyalty stacks up.

Why You Should Track Transactional NPS?

Transactional NPS offers immediate and specific insights that are valuable in identifying and addressing key pain points in the customer journey. It allows businesses to quickly and easily pinpoint operational strengths and weaknesses, and allows them to make data-driven improvements to the customer journey. Here is a closer look at reasons why you may want to track Transactional NPS:
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• Pinpoint Specific Issues: Transactional NPS helps identify exactly where in the customer journey things are going well or poorly and provides focused feedback. For example, a retail company can use tNPS after an online checkout and discover low scores are linked to a confusing step in the payment process and make improvements.
• Enable Quick Service Recovery: A low Transactional NPS score can provide immediate alerts and follow-up procedures with dissatisfied customers to resolve their issue quickly. A good example is that a software company's support team could contact a user who gave a low tNPS after a support chat to offer additional assistance and turn a negative experience into a positive one.
• Monitor Performance of Key Interactions: This KPI allows businesses to consistently track how well critical touchpoints - like product onboarding, a service call, or a delivery experience - are performing over time. Airlines could use tNPS after each flight to independently monitor satisfaction with the check-in process, in-flight service, and baggage handling.
• Empower Frontline Teams: Transactional NPS provides direct feedback to the teams that are responsible for specific customer interactions and help them understand their impact and identify areas for improvement. A hotel chain might share tNPS scores from post-stay surveys related to the check-in experience with their front desk staff to highlight opportunities for improvement.

‍READ MORE: How To Create a Net Promoter Score Survey

It is important to understand and recognize the differences and uses of transactional and relational NPS for your business. This data allows businesses to deploy a more complete and effective customer experience management strategy that will help promote long-term growth and success of your brand.

Contact boostCX for a demo of our customer experience management platform and find solutions that will help you track and analyze your Net Promoter Score!