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2024 Gladly CX Pulse Report
A pulse check on how the world’s most-loved brands are succeeding
February 01, 2024
Learn how to measure and optimize key CX metrics on the path to loyalty for long-term business growth.
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The Most Valuable Currency Is Shopper Loyalty
The Hierarchy of Customer Experience
Foundational CX Loyalty Metrics
Average Wait Time (AWT)
Average Handle Time (AHT)
Tickets Solved
Improving the Foundational Metrics
Improving Customer Satisfaction Metrics
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Improving CX Loyalty Metrics
Internal Quality Score (IQS)
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The Unparalleled Heights of True Customer Loyalty
In psychology, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps us visualize what’s necessary to achieve personal fulfillment. Similarly, in the hierarchy of customer experience, brands can find the essential steps for creating long-lasting customer relationships.
This customer experience metric value chain begins with the basic building block of customer experiences — transactions and interactions — and slowly builds toward the most valuable currency known to ecommerce brands: shopper loyalty.
To reach that valuable peak of loyalty at the top of the pyramid, ecommerce brands need to understand and optimize the service and CX loyalty metrics that establish their support center as a quality, attentive, and consistent operation. Hitting and superseding these numbers should become your focus as a CX leader to build long-lasting brand affinity with a wide, loyal audience.
In this guide, we’ll explore the key value metrics at each stage of the hierarchy, the purpose of measuring each value metric, and the strategies for optimizing your performance to continually move toward high-value customer relationships. With the right processes, training, and technology in place, you’ll have the makings of an exceptionally customer-centric brand — led by talented, thoughtful customer service agents.
All strong brand–customer relationships boil down to timely service, solution-oriented action, and consistency across interactions. One look at the hierarchy of customer service and it’s made that much more clear — “conversations” and “transactions” are at the bottom, the first steps toward lifelong loyalty. This is when a company has the opportunity to make a positive first impression and start working its way up the pyramid.
There are a few foundational loyalty metrics that are crucial for building your relationship with each customer. Here are the ones you should pay attention to, how to measure them, and why they help you move closer to the loyalty peak.
What it is Average wait time measures the average amount of time it takes an agent to respond to a customer request, inquiry, or complaint.
How to calculate Add up the total amount of time between customer outreach and response, and divide it by the number of customer requests.
How it moves you up the hierarchy The less a customer has to wait to hear back from your agents, the more appreciative they’ll be of the timely service. Lower AWT provides a better experience that can lead to a more satisfactory shopper response.
What it is This metric finds the average duration between when a customer reaches out and when the agent responds to, resolves, and then closes the ticket.
How to calculate Average handle time encompasses the entirety of a request resolution. Take the total amount of time, from request opening to closing — and any additional work needed afterward to close a ticket or conversation — and then divide that by the total number of requests.
How it moves you up the hierarchy Responding quickly is an important start (as AWT indicates), but paving a frictionless path toward a solution is the key to building your customers’ trust in your brand. Once AHT is optimized, your customer service center will be freed up to focus on the more important metrics that build satisfaction and, eventually, loyalty.
What it is This metric quantifies the exact amount of issues your support center has solved.
How to calculate “Tickets solved” doesn’t require any calculation — it’s simply the number of tickets that have been resolved over a period of time. Your customer service technology should keep a record of this number on a daily, monthly, or weekly basis.
How it moves you up the hierarchy A high volume of tickets solved could simply reflect the quantity of service, rather than the quality of your interactions. But as your agents have more conversations with shoppers, they will become more experienced and better at providing the service that drives the other metrics higher up the hierarchy.
Managers need to do everything in their power to optimize these metrics in order to pave the way for a successful customer service center. Consider some of the essential aspects of a well-attuned operation, and ensure you’re providing staff and customers with these capabilities:
Advancing up the hierarchy of customer experience requires a brand to deliver on the aforementioned foundational metrics. From there, relationships evolve into the “Satisfaction” tier, where brands shift focus on the customer loyalty metrics that ensure shoppers don’t just find boilerplate solutions but feel inspired to consider a brand more seriously.
What it is This metric measures the percentage of customer requests resolved during their initial outreach.
How to calculate Start by tallying up the number of times customers reach out per issue. Then, take the total number of customer requests and divide that number by the number of requests from previous outreaches to calculate your precise FCR average.
How it moves you up the hierarchy By boosting FCR, you can ensure customers feel taken care of every time. The better this metric performs, the more the customer will feel satisfied and potentially promote your brand to their friends and family.
How to improve FCR Provide your agents with the ability to improve their task resolution speed.
What it is This metric averages the level of customer satisfaction with your service quality, gathered through customer satisfaction surveys and other direct response tools. How to calculate CX leaders can derive customer satisfaction from surveys that ask questions about the quality of service shoppers have just received. In practice, these surveys should have a few key aspects in order to receive the best responses:
Once you’ve established these parameters, your CSAT is calculated on a 1-to-10 or 1-to-100 score by averaging out the customer responses. For example, an average CSAT of 85/100 indicates strong, but improvable, CSAT potential.
How it moves you up the hierarchy A high CSAT means happy customers — plain and simple. When your shoppers repeatedly have successful interactions with your brand, they’ll begin to trust you more and feel confident returning to shop with you.
How to improve CSAT You can increase your CSAT by forming a more impactful, effective service center. Focus on adding contact channels to improve customer satisfaction.
What it is This metric shows how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to another person — essentially, a quantifiable scale of who will be your brand’s champion.
How to calculate NPS can be found using a sample size of customers — ideally around 5% of your daily shoppers. Then, indicate which of them are “promoters” rather than complacent or detractors — you can gather this information in a couple of different ways:
Ask each of these shoppers if they’re likely to recommend your brand to a friend or family member. The number of respondents who say “yes” divided by the total number of customers surveyed is your final NPS.
How it moves you up the hierarchy High NPS is an early sign of customer trust. Improving this metric not only indicates that you’re performing well with your existing audience, but also that you’re putting the pieces in place to expand that consumer base through the affordable and valuable power of word-of-mouth referrals.
How to improve NPS Make an effort to drive up your NPS to turn your happy customers into brand ambassadors.
By focusing only on customer satisfaction metrics, you’ll become too invested in creating immediate revenue rather than establishing long-term value. Emotional connection drives sustainable customer loyalty — made valuable thanks to recurring, high-spending shoppers who love your brand.
In these final stages of the hierarchy — trust and loyalty — brands need to refine their efforts by focusing on the CX-focused loyalty metrics that reflect a curated tone, brand voice, and deep product knowledge.
What it is This metric is a self-reflective measurement for CX leaders and staff to determine whether their customer service centers are adequately helping their customers and representing their brand.
How to calculate Think of IQS like a self-auditing version of CSAT. To properly quantify this metric, you’ll have to establish certain KPIs for your service center — like product knowledge and conversation strength — and then measure your performance against these benchmarks. For instance, an internal auditor can evaluate these metrics on a 1–10 scale by comparing the total to an industry or internally set average.
Consider this example over SMS.
Based on just these three measurements, your IQS would land at 24/30 or 80% quality, which is relatively high, but could vary depending on the benchmark of success that you’ve established.
How it moves you up the hierarchy Implementing processes and systems to improve IQS is critical to improving the way your customer service center works over time. Higher IQS also means your agents can do their jobs more easily, increasing their productivity and preventing attrition. Here’s why:
How to improve IQS Building up better IQS requires your internal customer service infrastructure to be better attuned to hit the predetermined benchmarks you set.
What it is A numeric value based on the level of effort a customer has to give in order to reach a solution for their issues or requests.
How to calculate Like CSAT, CES is also calculated via survey. The final score should be an average of the responses to specific survey questions that ask about ease of use, channel access, overall experience difficulty, and more.
Once you have your responses, take the average of the scalar responses to find your CES.
How it moves you up the hierarchy Better CES reflects an essential piece of a loyalty-driving experience — ensuring that no matter how or when a customer comes to your service center, they’re able to find a solution with minimal effort. As noted by Gartner, “Customer effort is 40% more accurate at predicting customer loyalty as opposed to customer satisfaction”
How to improve CES Stronger CES is possible through a more comprehensive customer service center — one that uses intelligent tools to give the best possible solution to each customer every time.
The hierarchy of customer experience provides a direct path for you to achieve the long-lasting, valuable customer loyalty that every brand craves. Take the tips and strategies in this ebook and implement them to optimize each metric for the maximum return on your customer service center investment.
In your action plan for supercharging these metrics, consider using Gladly as your customer service solution of choice to turn your call center into a bona fide revenue-generating machine.
Turn your customer service agents into heroes of your brand
Check out this CX leader's guide to building and maintaining a support center.
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