Nowadays it's getting harder and harder to make a sale. Sales cycles are three to five times longer. The value of each sale seems to be dropping. And the chances of a repeat sale appear to be getting slimmer because competition is so stiff. This means that it has never been more important to deliver exceptional experiences to your customers so that they'll keep coming back again and again.

So how are your customer experiences initiatives working out? At this point you're probably saying one of three things: everything is moving along nicely or we're trying to get better all the time or I don't know. It's the last answer that really scares me. I'm sure you've heard the saying that you can't manage what you don't measure? I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.

One of the cardinal rules of a successful customer experience program is to measure, measure, measure. You need to be constantly checking behind you to ensure that things are still moving in the right direction. How else will you know if you're making mistakes? How will you know if the changes you're making are effective?

How do you measure the success of your customer experience program, though? Well, there are several ways:

1. An increase in the number of sales overall
   
2. More revenue (the number of orders or the average order size per customer)
   
3. An increase in the number of customers coming back to buy again
   
4. More referrals from customers
   
5. More positive feedback from customers
   

One of the more popular ways to measure the success of a customer experience (or customer service) program is to track the number of sales made. This is a simple way to measure but be careful because it may not tell you the whole story and here's why. If you were making 5 sales a month before the implementation of your customer experience program and now you're making 8 sales a month, that's good right? Maybe. And maybe not. While it may seem positive, you'll want to look at the average dollar value of the sales as well.

Another way to measure the success of your customer experience program is to look at increases in the number of orders each customer makes or in the average size of your customers' orders. This has an incredibly powerful affect on your bottom line. Stop and think about it for a moment. How much more money would you make if say just a small number of your customers (you can be conservative here if you like) spent 10% more on each order. Or, what if that same number of customers bought from you just one more time in each calendar year? Go ahead and calculate it. The results will astonish you.

Yet another way to measure success is to track the number of clients you keep. If it costs 5 to 10 times more to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one, why aren't organizations more focused on keeping existing customers happy. Oh yes companies say that they're going to do a lot of things but are they really delivering on their brand promises?

The most powerful form of marketing is word-of-mouth referrals. It's also the cheapest type of marketing. Having customers tell one or two friends about your company is the absolute fastest way of winning new customers. For the most part, they're going to trust their friends to give them good advice and that's good news for you. You want all the free advertising you can get, right?

The type of measurement that is going to make you feel the greatest (yes I'm talking about feelings again) is the last one on the list. Getting positive feedback from customers is extremely gratifying. Don't you just sleep better at night when someone has made you feel great during the day? This feedback works wonders for your staff too! Why? It's because everyone needs positive feedback and reinforcement.

This month in a poll that I conduct every month I asked how companies are measuring the success of their customer experience programs. The answers didn't surprise me at all but maybe you'll be surprised:

26% use sales to measure the success of their customer experience program
32% look at their customer retention rate
19% count the number of referrals they receive
but 21% don't measure at all.

Wow! One in five companies are not measuring the success of their customer experience initiatives. Hmmm...how do those companies know what's working and what isn't? Is this like shooting darts at a dartboard with a blindfold on?

Do you agree or disagree? Let me know.

Ruth-Anne Boyd is the Business Development Director at The Customer Experience Company. She is an award-winning writer, consultant, speaker and trainer with over 15 years experience in plain language communications and workflow simplification. Ruth-Anne has won 11 awards for her communication material. She is a frequently invited speaker, and a member of PLAIN (the Plain Language Association International), Canadian Women in Communications (CWC) and DigitalEve.