Customer experience (CX) and its components are hot topics in IT and business right now, with terms like “customer journey,” “brand touch points,” and “customer environments” flooding tech articles and best practice lists. In theory, centering your solutions around customer experience should result in solutions that meet or exceed customer expectations — but how do you actually measure customer satisfaction?

In a traditional brick-and-mortar storefront, measuring CX is straightforward. During face-to-face customer interactions, employees can easily gather insight into happiness or frustration based on facial expressions, body language, and verbal cues. Digital solutions like websites, on the other hand, eliminate these visual and verbal clues, so we must turn to new tools and techniques for CX measurement. In our experience, directed surveys are the best CX measurement mechanism.

Surveys allow digital services providers to:

• Gather valuable customer insights
• Determine if customer needs are met
• Identify customer pain points
• Adjust services based on customer input

Creating effective surveys

As part of the overall interaction between the service provider and the customer, taking surveys should create a positive experience for your customers. Meaningful and positive surveys begin with thoughtful creation and delivery. Effective surveys should:

• Address moments that matter (MTM) to the customer and their journey
• Ask targeted questions aligned with specific customer interactions
• Elicit specific and actionable feedback

From a customer perspective, targeted surveys show you have carefully thought through what their interaction entails and care about their specific experience feedback. This, in turn, generates specific and actionable feedback, allowing you to adjust services or processes, reset customer expectations, and identify trends for ongoing improvement. On the other hand, generic questions or high-level surveys can make customers feel unvalued or unseen, and frequently result in generic, non-actionable feedback.