Introduction
While the goal of your customer experience program (CX) is:
It's important to keep in mind that these are lagging metrics — the glory of 'banging on the pipe'.
But the leading metrics? The hard graft inputs that create all that glory?
- Improve response rates
- Maximize coverage
- Close the loop with Detractors
- Activate Promoters
And all the other underappreciated and unseen hard work that goes into building the most successful businesses in the world.
There's a reason that each year we celebrate companies with high responses, closed-loop rates, engaged employees, and maximum coverage. It's the secret sauce behind a revenue-growth-driving experience program.
Let's break down some of those core leading metrics.
4 Leading B2B Experience Metrics to Focus on in 2025
In the iceberg image above, it's quite clear that there's a lot that goes into building a successful program with revenue opportunities.
In our recent webinar, we deep-dived a few more of them.
Everything we do at CustomerGauge comes back to revenue: how can we help our customers grow?
With that in mind, these four are particularly important to focus on:
1. Improve Response Rates
The more B2B customer feedback you collect the more “in the know” you are and the more action you can take. Just imagine for a second if you treated all non-respondents as NPS Detractors (Fred Reichheld recommends this). Your score would look very different:
That paints a much more realistic and worrying picture of your account health.
Follow up with non-responses and especially ensure you have responses from stakeholders across different hierarchy levels. Not just the user.
📖 Further reading: How to improve response rates
📖 Further reading: Survey multiple contacts, multiple times per year. Here's why.
2. Maximize Coverage
You want feedback signals from every single one of your customers. The more of your revenue base is covered, the more revenue you can rescue or grow.
Top tip: You should start with getting responses from your largest accounts first, then work your way down the list until 100% of your revenue base is covered.
📖 Further reading: Absence of signal, the hidden churn indicator
3. Close the loop with Detractors
You wouldn’t walk away from a friend offering you advice. So, why would you ignore a customer?
Top tip: For the best results on retention, close the loop with Detractors within 48 hours.
📖 Further reading: Closed-loop feedback best practices & original data
4. Activate Promoters
So you’ve got all these Promoters now, wahoo! Now what? We recommend that you activate them. Get with your sales or success teams and work out a plan to take advantage of your happiest customers.
Upsell opportunities lie at the intersection of small revenue Promoter accounts that have large revenue potential.
📖 Further reading: Learn how to identify upsell opportunities with Net Promoter
📖 Further reading: B2B referral marketing guide
We hope these tips help. Plenty more where they came from!