TL;DR
- NPS asks 0-10 likelihood to recommend: promoters score 9-10, passives 7-8, detractors 0-6; NPS = % promoters minus % detractors, range -100 to +100.
- CSAT = satisfied responses / total responses x 100, usually counting 4-5 on a 5-point scale; keep the cut-off fixed or months cannot be compared.
- CES is the average effort score, e.g. agreement with 'the company made it easy to resolve my issue' on a 1-7 scale; check which end of the scale means easy.
- UX covers one digital product and customer service covers contacts; CX covers every touchpoint including pricing, delivery and returns, so a good site with a painful return policy still yields poor CX.
Customer experience is the total experience a customer has with a brand, from the first time they see an ad, through researching, ordering, waiting for delivery and contacting after-sales support, plus the overall feeling the customer forms from all of those moments together. The common abbreviation is CX, and what separates CX from ordinary service work is that no single department owns it: marketing, sales, product, fulfilment and customer service all produce it between them.
This article explains what customer experience means, how CX differs from UX and customer service, the parts of CX along the customer journey, how to measure it with NPS, CSAT and CES including the formulas, how to improve CX for online shops and LINE Official Accounts, and the mistakes that come up most often.
What is customer experience (CX)?
At its shortest, CX is the sum of a customer's perceptions of every interaction with a business. The word "perception" matters, because CX is measured from the customer's side, not the company's. A company may think it ships fast because orders leave within one day, but if the customer never gets a tracking number and has to message to ask, the experience the customer remembers is "I had to chase my order".
CX has two sides that need watching at the same time. The first is the practical side: can I find the product, can I pay, did it arrive on time. The second is the emotional side: did I feel attended to, am I confident I will get my money back if something goes wrong. A business that only fixes the first side may have systems that all work while customers still feel they are talking to a machine. A business that only works on the second side may be pleasant to talk to and still ship late.
How CX differs from UX and customer service
The three are related but differ in scope. An easy way to remember it: customer service is one part of CX, and UX is another part of CX.
| Concept | Scope | Examples of what it looks at |
|---|---|---|
| Customer experience (CX) | Every point where the customer touches the brand, online and offline, before, during and after purchase | Ads, pricing, delivery, returns, chat replies, consistency of information across channels |
| User experience (UX) | The experience of using one digital product, such as a website or app | Can users find the menu, is the form easy, does the page load fast, how many checkout steps |
| Customer service | Help given when a customer makes contact, usually answering questions or solving problems | Chat response time, first-contact resolution, politeness, accuracy of answers |
An example that shows the difference: an online shop has a very easy website, so UX is good. Its chat team is polite and quick, so customer service is good. But the returns policy makes customers pay return shipping and wait a long time for the refund. A customer who received the wrong size will remember the whole thing as a hassle, so CX is poor even though the first two parts are good.
The parts of CX along the customer journey
The customer journey is the path a customer walks from not knowing the brand to becoming a repeat buyer. Splitting the path into stages shows who owns each touchpoint and what the customer expects there.
Awareness
The customer sees an ad, a post, a review or a search result. The experience at this stage is about whether what the ad promises matches what the customer finds next. An ad showing one price when the website shows another damages CX at the first step.
Consideration
The customer visits the website, reads product details and reviews, and often messages to ask something. Typical questions at this stage are about size, stock, shipping cost and delivery time. Information that is easy to find and answers that arrive quickly make for good CX here.
Purchase
The checkout steps, payment options, order confirmation and the confirmation email or message. Carts tend to be abandoned at the point where the customer meets an unexpected cost or is forced to register before buying.
Delivery and use
Tracking notifications, packaging condition, instructions, and whether the real product matches the photos. This stage is often overlooked because marketing does not own it, yet it is where customers form most of their overall feeling.
After-sales and repeat purchase
Claims and returns, follow-up, offers for the next purchase, and remembering the customer's history. A customer who has to explain the same problem again every time they make contact feels that nobody remembers them.
How to measure customer experience: NPS, CSAT and CES
Three metrics are widely used to measure CX. Each asks a different question and suits a different point in the journey. This section explains the standard formulas. The numbers in the examples are hypothetical and only show how the calculation works.
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
NPS measures willingness to recommend the brand, using one question: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" Respondents answer on a 0 to 10 scale and fall into three groups.
- Those who answer 9-10 are promoters.
- Those who answer 7-8 are passives.
- Those who answer 0-6 are detractors.
The formula is NPS = percentage of promoters minus percentage of detractors. The result runs from -100 to +100. Passives are not used directly in the formula but still count in the total number of respondents. Hypothetical example: 200 people respond, with 100 promoters (50%), 60 passives (30%) and 40 detractors (20%). NPS is 50 minus 20, which equals 30.
NPS suits measuring the long-term relationship with a brand, for example a survey every quarter or after the customer has used the product for a while. Its limit is that it tells you how customers feel but not why, so it should be followed by an open question such as "What is the main reason for your score?"
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
CSAT measures satisfaction with one specific interaction, such as after a chat is closed or after the product arrives. The usual question is "How satisfied were you with this service?" answered on a 1 to 5 scale.
The formula is CSAT = number of satisfied responses divided by total responses, times 100. On a five-point scale, answers of 4 and 5 are usually counted as "satisfied". Hypothetical example: 80 people respond and 64 give a 4 or a 5. CSAT is 64 divided by 80, times 100, which equals 80%.
One thing to watch is that the cut-off for "satisfied" must stay fixed. If one month counts 4-5 and the next month counts only 5, the numbers cannot be compared.
CES (Customer Effort Score)
CES measures how much effort the customer had to put in to get something done, such as returning a product or fixing an account problem. A common version asks how far the customer agrees with the statement "The company made it easy for me to resolve my issue" on a 1 to 7 scale.
The usual formula is CES = sum of all scores divided by the number of respondents, which is simply the average score. Hypothetical example: five respondents give 7, 6, 5, 6 and 4. The sum is 28, divided by 5 gives a CES of 5.6 on a seven-point scale. Check first whether a high score on your scale means "easy" or "hard", because some surveys reverse the direction.
CES is useful at points where the customer has to do the work, such as a refund form or changing a delivery address, because it shows clearly which step creates the friction.
Data that needs no survey
Besides surveys, there is behavioural data that reflects CX, such as repeat purchase rate, cart abandonment rate, return rate, first response time in chat, and the number of contacts a customer needs before an issue is closed. These numbers usually already exist in the back office, the chat system or the CRM, and they help confirm whether survey scores line up with actual behaviour.
Improving customer experience for online shops
An online shop controls almost all of its touchpoints, so CX can be improved step by step. These are the places to check first.
- Information customers keep asking for. Collect the questions that arrive in chat most often and put the answers on the product page, such as size charts, materials and delivery time. Every question a customer can answer alone is one less wait.
- Costs that appear at the end. Show shipping costs or the free-shipping threshold on the product page or in the cart, not only at the last step.
- Checkout. Allow guest checkout, cut the number of fields, and support the payment methods customers in Thailand use, such as PromptPay, cards and cash on delivery.
- Post-order status. Send an order confirmation, the tracking number, and a notice when there is a delay, before the customer has to ask.
- A returns policy people can understand. Write the conditions in plain language, list the steps, and state the refund time clearly.
- The mobile site. Most online shoppers use phones. A slow page or hard-to-tap buttons is a UX problem that turns into a CX problem.
Improving CX through a LINE Official Account
For businesses in Thailand, a LINE Official Account is often the main channel customers use to make contact, before and after purchase. These are the parts you can adjust.
- Greeting message and Rich Menu. Use the greeting to say what this channel can do and when it replies, and use the Rich Menu as shortcuts to frequent topics such as checking parcel status, viewing promotions or talking to staff.
- Automate only fixed-answer topics. Opening hours, address and shipping costs can be automated. Topics that need judgement, such as claims, should go to a person, and the customer should be told when to expect an answer.
- Connect customer history. A CRM connected to LINE lets staff see past orders and conversations, so the customer does not have to repeat themselves.
- Message by behaviour, not the same thing to everyone. Broadcasting the same promotion to everyone too often gets the account blocked. Segmenting by purchase history makes messages fit the recipient better.
- Ask for satisfaction after the conversation ends. Send one short CSAT question after a case is closed to track chat quality over time.
Common CX mistakes
- Measuring without fixing. NPS is collected every month, but nobody reads the open answers or owns the job of fixing what they reveal.
- Looking only at the average. Overall CSAT may look fine, but split by channel or issue type you may find that product claims score very low.
- Surveying too often. Customers who get a survey after every contact stop answering, and the people who still answer may be only the very happy or very unhappy.
- Making CX the customer service team's job alone. Many problems come from pricing policy, delivery or product information, which customer service cannot fix on its own.
- Inconsistent information across channels. If prices on the website, the marketplace and in chat differ, customers start to distrust every channel.
- A bot that answers everything with no route to a person. A customer with a specific problem who loops through automated menus gets more frustrated than one who waits for a human.
Customer experience in the Thai market
Several traits of the Thai market affect CX. The first is buying through chat, known as conversational commerce. Many customers message before deciding to buy, whether on LINE, Facebook Messenger or marketplace chat on Shopee and Lazada, so the speed and accuracy of chat replies make up a large part of CX. The second is that customers often buy across several channels at once, so customer data is spread across several systems. Bringing it together in one place allows consistent replies. The third is personal data protection under the PDPA. Collecting customer data to measure and improve CX needs a legal basis, a stated purpose, and a choice for the customer on whether to receive marketing messages.
Language matters as well. A survey translated literally from English can read stiff or ambiguous in Thai. Rewrite the questions in the language customers actually use, and test them with a few people before sending.
Customer experience FAQ
Which department owns customer experience?
CX is shared work across several departments, and there should be one lead person or team who looks at the whole journey. Marketing covers awareness, sales and the chat team cover consideration, operations covers delivery, and customer service covers after-sales, but someone has to connect the data from all of them.
Which metric should we start with?
Most businesses find CSAT the easiest place to start, because it is asked after each interaction and ties straight to a specific issue. Once data collection is in place, add NPS to track the long-term relationship, and use CES on the steps where customers tend to get stuck.
What does a negative NPS mean?
A negative NPS means that, in that group of respondents, the share who scored 0-6 is larger than the share who scored 9-10. Read it together with the open answers to find the causes, and look at the trend against previous rounds rather than interpreting one round alone.
How are CX and the customer journey related?
The customer journey is the map of the path and its touchpoints, while CX is the quality of the experience along that path. A journey map helps show which metric to use at which point, and which point to fix first.
Summary and next step
Good CX starts with seeing the customer's whole path, measuring it with clear formulas that stay fixed, and then fixing the points where customers have to work or wait for no reason. Businesses that sell online can look at ecommerce customer experience optimization. If the main problem is chat volume and repeated answers, see customer service process automation. For bringing customer history together on LINE there is LINE CRM, and if the website is where customers get stuck, see web design.
