Table of contents:
The Best CX KPIs for 2025
New year, new customer service center. Sounds great, right? 2025 is the year you want to improve your CX across the board. What better way to reach your goals for the year—and keep your customers loyal and happy—than by quantifying your goals with some CX KPIs?
Measuring customer experience is complex, and requires both subjective (customer ratings) and objective (numbers-based) metrics to evaluate properly. Given this, we’ve compiled 10 noteworthy KPIs for your CX team to use and analyze. From reducing churn to reducing your reply time, these KPIs will help you deliver the best customer experience in 2025!
1. Average Reply Time
The average length of time it takes for the support team to respond to a customer query, Average Reply Time is a bellwether for ascertaining the overall quality of your customer support. An unusually high Reply Time will indicate insufficient personnel on your support team, insufficient levels of training, or both. Meanwhile, a low Reply Time is an important indicator that you’ve got the most important aspect of CX under control: showing your customers respect by getting back to them in a timely manner.
đź’ˇ Good to Remember
- Unlike First Response Time, ART measures the entire time between customer’s first contact and agent response.
đź“Š Industry Benchmarks
- Support desk: 6-12 hours
- Phone support: <3 minutes
- Live chat: 1-2 minutes
- Email: 1-24 hours
2. CSAT
Customer Satisfaction, or CSAT, is one of the best-known CX KPIs. Information about your customers’ satisfaction is obtained through surveys, where customers indicate their level of satisfaction with your product or service by measuring it on a 1-10 (or sometimes 1-5) scale. Those who give an 8-10 (or 4-5) rating are considered “satisfied.” You can combine data from CSAT with other, more objective metrics to paint an overall picture of customers’ happiness with your product or service.
đź’ˇ Good to Remember
- While CSAT measures customer satisfaction in a given moment, its close cousin NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures customer satisfaction in a more general way.
- Having surveys sent out automatically to customers immediately after making a purchase is the tried-and-true method for obtaining CSAT. But don’t overdo it, lest customers get survey fatigue and refuse to answer.
đź“Š Industry Benchmarks
- Global average: 75-85%
- Good: >80%
- Exceptional: >90%
3. Net Promoter Score
How likely are your customers to recommend your product or service to others? This is what Net Promoter Score, or NPS, seeks to measure. A more complex and comprehensive measurement than CSAT, it’s essentially the difference between the percentage of your promoters and your detractors. But who just are your “promoters” and “detractors,” and how do you determine who is who?
Just like with CSAT, your customers are sent a survey asking about their perception of your business. But here’s where NPS differs from CSAT: your respondents are divided into three categories, not just two: promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), and detractors (0-6).
Then here’s where things get complicated: you first find the percentages of detractors and promoters, then subtract the percentage of detractors from promoters. (Neutrals are disregarded!) This means your final score will be anywhere between -100 and +100.
While a “good” score is considered a +1 or higher, of course it’s a good idea to have a much higher score than +1!
đź’ˇ Good to Remember
- Drill down and dig deeper with your NPS surveys by including qualitative sections–asking your customers why they answered as they did. While this qualitative section isn’t included within the NPS calculation, it will still provide invaluable insight into your customers’ behavior and motivations.
- You can obtain even more insight via NPS by assigning your main customer demographics their own NPS surveys.
đź“Š Industry Benchmarks
- Excellent: +50-70
- Good: +30-50
- Average: +10-30
- Low: 0-+10
4. Customer Acquisition Cost
Otherwise known as CAC, Customer Acquisition Cost refers to the cost needed to obtain a customer within a given period. Essentially, it’s the ratio of your sales and marketing expenses to your number of newly acquired customers.
Just what is included in the category of “sales and marketing expenses”? Well, it includes ad spend, salaries, subscriptions for marketing tools, promotional materials, upgrade costs…basically, anything and everything you spend in the service of obtaining more customers.
The magic number to know for CAC is 3:1. This is the ratio of Lifetime Value to CAC—in other words, for every dollar spent to acquire a customer, you obtain three dollars in return.
đź’ˇ Good to Remember
- There are many variants of CAC, each relevant for different situations, including initial, product, and customer CACs. CAC is often evaluated alongside other KPIs such as Lifetime Value (LTV) and Churn Rate.
đź“Š Industry Benchmarks
- E-Commerce: $45-300
- SaaS: $200-1500
- Retail: $10-50
- B2B Services: $500-2000
5. Cart Abandonment Rate
Cart Abandonment Rate describes the percentage of your customers who add items to their virtual shopping cart, but leave it before buying anything. The high “normal” rate of Cart Abandonment—hovering around 70%—testifies both to the difficulty of retaining customers’ engagement, but also companies’ lack of interest in addressing this problem. And it’s a big one: some estimate Cart Abandonment can cost up to $3 billion annually.
đź’ˇ Good to Remember
- The checkout process remains a vulnerable point for customer satisfaction, with glitchy software, excessive steps (such as creating an account), and extraneous costs (such as taxes and shipping fees) demotivating potential customers from pressing the “Order” button.
- You can address this issue—and stay ahead of your competition—with two simple fixes for Cart Abandonment Rate: by notifying customers of unpurchased items, and improving the intuitiveness and efficiency of your checkout process.
đź“Š Industry Benchmarks
- Excellent: 40-50%
- Good: 50-60%
- Average: 60-80%
- High: 80-90%
6. Customer Effort Score
Also referred to as CES, Customer Effort Score is another scale-based KPI. But unlike CSAT and NPS, it measures only one simple question: “How easy was it for me to handle my issue with Company X?” While just a single question, it packs a heavy punch. Customers want to have as few steps as possible when attempting to resolve an issue. A consistently high—or low—CES will therefore reveal a lot about the efficacy of your CX.
đź’ˇ Good to Remember
- CES is often measured on a 1-7 scale, but happy/neutral/unhappy emoticons can also be used to generate a quick response from customers. “Satisfied” scores are considered 5-7.
đź“Š Industry Benchmarks
- Excellent / Low Effort: 6.5-7.0
- Good / Acceptable Effort: 5.5-6.4
- Average Effort: 4.0-5.4
- Poor / High Effort: 1.0-3.9
7. Churn Rate
We now come to the all-important Churn Rate—it’s no one’s favorite metric, but it has to be discussed anyway! Simply put, Churn Rate measures the percentage of customers who cancel their subscription or cease doing business with your company in a given period.
đź’ˇ Good to Remember
- Reducing churn is often a multifaceted process that takes time and significant resources to address. A company actively reducing its Churn Rate to a manageable level is in an all-hands-on-deck scenario, requiring the help of everybody to get the situation under control. Because churn is so expensive, however, a successful churn reduction process will inevitably pay off in the end.
đź“Š Industry Benchmarks
- SaaS: 3-5% monthly
- Telecom: 1.5-2% monthly
- Financial Services: 20-25% annually
- E-Commerce and Retail: 20-30% annually
8. Lifetime Value
It’s abbreviated as LTV, but also known as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). In short, it’s a metric that indicates the total revenue a company can expect from a customer throughout the entire time the customer remains with the company. LTV is useful for determining marketing spend and, of course, improving your customer retention strategy.
đź’ˇ Good to Remember
- LTV is directly tied to CAC! Remember the 3:1 number? That’s the ratio of LTV to CAC: for every dollar spent obtaining a customer, you obtain three dollars back.
đź“Š Industry Benchmarks
- SaaS: $1000–5000 per customer
- E-Commerce: $250 per customer
- Financial Services: $3700 per customer
- Commercial Insurance: $3000 per customer
9. Latest Customer Feedback/Comment
This isn’t strictly a KPI as it’s not quantifiable. But Latest Customer Feedback can still yield valuable insights into customer sentiment and behavior. Displaying your Latest Customer Feedback on a dashboard in your office will give you a bit of immediate feedback on what customers are saying and thinking. If you’re in the process of an overhaul, redesign, or other enhancement to your product, seeing the positive comments roll in will give your teams that motivation to keep doing a great job!
đź’ˇ Good to Remember
- Keeping track of your Latest Customer Feedback goes beyond “just the numbers,” as it adds a human touch to evaluations of your customer beliefs and behavior. Individual feedback is also a great starting point for an agent to follow up with a customer about his/her experience.
- That said, while customer comments are absolutely worth monitoring, remember to evaluate these more subjective statements alongside directly objective, number-based ones to obtain a complete picture of your customer experience.
10. Trustpilot Score
Your Trustpilot Score goes beyond just Trustpilot! In a day and age when internet knowledge often substitutes for word-of-mouth recommendations, companies can’t afford to be complacent about what customers are saying about them online. That’s why this KPI is very important: it provides a snapshot of what customers are saying and thinking about your business, and the fact it’s derived from third parties, not an in-house survey, gives it an extra appeal of authenticity.
đź’ˇ Good to Remember
- Customers are more likely to give feedback when they have a strong emotion—whether positive or negative—about your product or service. If you want to boost your Trustpilot Score, make it a priority to give your customers a true “Wow!” experience.
đź“Š Industry Benchmarks
- Retail and E-Commerce: 4.0–4.5
- SaaS: 4.0–4.5
- Customer Satisfaction: 4.0–4.5
- Online Services: 4.0–4.7
The Plecto Difference
While measuring and evaluating KPIs might be a numbers game at first glance, in reality it’s much more. Every CX KPI goal you meet brings you one step closer to delivering the best customer experience possible—and happy, satisfied customers translates to increased revenue growth.
Plecto offers an ideal data dashboard solution for your CX team to track its KPI goals. With both real-time and dynamic dashboards available that include a wide variety of KPI widgets, getting your CX team to hit its targets has never been easier—or more fun. Sign up here for a free 14-day Plecto trial today.
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JAMES NIILER
Content Specialist
An in-house content writer and specialist at Plecto, James brings an academic touch and journalistic flair to his marketing copy. Having worked and studied on both sides of the Atlantic, James is a great believer in the importance of communicating across cultures and industries. Catch his work here on the Plecto blog, or as a guest contributor on other B2B websites.
