Customer experience is the sum of everything a person feels, perceives, and remembers after interacting with a company: from the first time they heard about it to the moment they decided to stay or leave.

In fact, customer experience isn’t just built by the customer service team, as many companies think, but it’s built by everyone at once, and it’s the visible result of how a company works from the inside.

The difference between customer experience and customer service

One of the most common misunderstandings is to use both terms as if they were the same, but they are not.

Customer service is a specific moment; it is an interaction limited in time, with a clear beginning and end, such as when someone calls because they have a problem or writes because they need information.
However, customer experience (CX) encompasses everything that a person perceives every time they come into contact with a company, whether physically or digitally. Managing that experience through strategies, technology, and processes allows organizations to improve their results by creating interactions that truly satisfy people. When this is done well, an emotional bond is generated that translates into something very concrete: more customers, greater loyalty, and a longer-lasting and more profitable relationship with each of them.

Why CX has become the main competitive battleground

For decades, companies competed on price and product, and while those factors are still important, today they are no longer enough to make a difference.
Today, in a market so saturated with similar products at our fingertips, changing brands, products or services is easier than ever.

This new reality has forced organizations to look for new ways to differentiate themselves. And that’s where customer experience (CX) has come to play a leading role; beyond what a company sells, it increasingly matters how it makes its customers feel in each interaction. Because products can be copied, prices can be matched, but building a memorable experience aligned with customer expectations is much more difficult to replicate.

The metrics that allow you to measure the customer experience

Customer experience is linked to perceptions, expectations and emotions. And although it may seem a difficult concept to quantify, there are indicators that allow it to be measured objectively and follow its evolution over time, such as:

The Net Promoter Score (NPS)®

• It measures the probability that a customer will recommend the company, on a scale of 0 to 10.
• Those who answer from 0 to 6 are detractors, that is, they will not recommend your brand, and in fact it is possible that they speak badly of you.
• Between 7 and 8 are the so-called passives, they will surely be satisfied, but they will not recommend you.
  And finally, those who rate with a 9 or 10 will be those called promoters, that is, those who will be satisfied and will speak well of your brand to others.

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

It focuses on the level of satisfaction after a specific interaction, such as a purchase, a call to customer service, or the resolution of an incident. It is a very useful metric to evaluate specific moments in the customer journey and detect opportunities for operational improvement.

The Customer Effort Score (CES)

It measures how much effort the customer has had to make to solve something. It starts from a strong premise: customers don’t need the company to be extraordinary in every interaction, but they do need it to be easy. Reducing friction is often more cost-effective than trying to dazzle.

The Net Emotional Value (NEV)

An indicator that seeks to quantify the emotional connection that a customer establishes with a brand or service. Its approach is based on a widely accepted reality in the discipline of Customer Experience: decisions and loyalty do not depend only on rational factors, but also on the emotions generated by each interaction. Measuring this dimension allows us to better understand why two customers with similar levels of satisfaction can show very different behaviors in terms of recommendation, permanence or brand loyalty. This metric is mainly measured through artificial intelligence, which categorizes each of the survey comments.

Of course, none of these metrics alone explains what is really happening. Their true value appears when they are analysed together and, above all, when they are complemented with qualitative feedback.

How Opinat helps you measure

Building a measurement system that connects timely satisfaction with the overall customer experience is not always easy. To achieve this, it is necessary to have a platform capable of combining different listening methodologies.

Opinat is designed exactly for that. From a single platform, you can set up listening workflows at all touchpoints in the journey across multiple channels. And with analytics, automation, and reporting capabilities, teams can identify trends, spot issues in real-time, and access visual reports without having to rely on external tools or spend time building dashboards from scratch.

As experts in NPS®, in the case of incorporating this question into the survey, dashboards are not the last step in our software. The software allows you to carry out a last follow-up action to contact detractors, passives or promoters, thus improving communication with the customer. For example, we can send a promoter or a passive a discount voucher on their next purchase, while we can contact a detractor to find out what happened. In this way, each customer feels listened to and cared for.

The result is a 360º vision of the state of satisfaction of our customers and what they think of us. It is knowing and being able to turn feedback into decisions, which allows us to transform the measurement of experience into a real competitive advantage.