Are You Measuring the Right Parts of Customer Experience in Your Business?

by Sean Foster | November 6, 2025 | Business Coaching

Most business owners know that customer experience matters. But knowing it matters and knowing what to measure are two very different things. If you’re relying only on surface-level indicators like one-off reviews or net promoter scores without digging deeper, you could be missing the very insights that drive growth, loyalty, and repeat business.

Why Measuring Customer Experience Goes Beyond Reviews

A five-star review or a happy customer email feels good. But do these signals give you a complete picture of how your customers feel about their journey with your business? Not quite. According to PwC, 73% of customers say experience is a key factor in purchasing decisions, yet only 49% of U.S. consumers say companies provide a good experience today.

The gap lies in what gets measured, and what doesn’t.

Most businesses default to these:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Online reviews and testimonials

While these are helpful, they often reflect the end of the journey. To improve retention, lifetime value, and referral potential, you need to measure the whole journey.

Hint: Let’s think about the balance between leading and lagging measures.

Going deeper into understanding your customer involves completing a FFWA. This concept is explored further in our article: Harnessing FFWA to Propel Customer Satisfaction.

What Parts of the Customer Experience Are You Overlooking?

Here are areas that often go unmeasured but heavily impact perception:

1. Response Time and First Contact Resolution

How long do customers wait to hear back from you? Do they have to repeat themselves to multiple people? The speed and clarity of your first response shapes their entire view of your business.

2. Ease of Doing Business

How easy is it to get a quote, schedule a service, or ask a question? According to Gartner, reducing customer effort has a stronger link to loyalty than delighting them. If your processes are clunky, it doesn’t matter how friendly your team is.

3. Follow-Through and Consistency

Is the experience consistent across team members, locations, or interactions? A lack of follow-through erodes trust, even if your team is well-intentioned.

4. Post-Sale Engagement

What happens after the sale? Do you follow up, support them in using your service or product, or gather feedback proactively? Retention lives here.

Why This Matters for Business Owners

If your team tells you “everything is fine” but you still see inconsistent growth, customer churn, or low referrals, the issue might not be your marketing or pricing. It might be how your customers feel while working with your business.
Here’s where things get tricky: most of these gaps are invisible unless you actively look for them. And as the owner, you’re often too close to see them clearly.

To help you make sense of the full journey, you can start by visually mapping out your customer experience. Doing this helps uncover where expectations aren't being met, and where positive moments can be strengthened. We’ve broken this down step-by-step in our article: How to Map Customer Experience.

How Business Coaching Helps You Measure What Matters

Working with a business coach can help uncover blind spots in your customer journey. Coaching doesn’t just support leadership or operations, it helps you:

• Map out the full customer journey
• Identify moments that matter most
• Design simple ways to collect meaningful feedback
• Create habits around team accountability to customer experience

Coaching also creates space for you to look beyond firefighting and ask: “What do we want our customers to feel at each stage, and how do we know if we’re achieving that?”

This isn't a theory. It’s strategy backed by reflection, data, and implementation.

To better understand how coaching supports you in these areas beyond just customer experience, we explore the broader benefits in our article: What Problems Does a Business Coach Solve?.

What to Start Measuring Right Now

If you’re not already, consider adding these metrics:

• Time to first response (especially for new leads)
• Customer effort score (CES): ask “How easy was it to [complete action]?”
• Completion rate of post-sale onboarding
• Repeat purchase rate or subscription renewal rate
• Unprompted referrals or positive mentions

Don’t measure for the sake of it. Measure what drives decisions.

FAQ

Q1: What is the most important customer experience metric? It depends on your business model, but customer effort score (CES) and first contact resolution often reveal more than generic satisfaction surveys.

Q2: Why is customer experience measurement important for small businesses? It shows you where customers struggle, what builds trust, and where you're losing opportunities, critical for growth and retention.

Q3: Can a business coach help improve customer experience? Yes. A coach helps you understand your customer journey, build systems for feedback, and hold your team accountable to consistent experience delivery.

Q4: What’s the risk of only using NPS or reviews? They only reflect extremes or the end of the experience. You miss important signals earlier in the customer’s journey. They are lag measures, where all businesses need both Lead and Lag measures.

Ready to Understand What Your Customers Really Experience?

Not sure what your customers are really experiencing? Book a free 30-minute clarity call with Sean and learn how to uncover insights that will actually grow your business.