Once a marketing buzzword and now table stakes for brands and retailers, omnichannel is a customer engagement strategy that provides seamless, personalized experiences across every channel and device.

According to CMO Council’s How Covid Has Changed the Channels of Engagement 2020 Report, the top five engagement channels that consumers expect from brands are email, website, voice call, live person, and SMS text. By designing the customer experience to remain fluid and high-quality across each of these channels, brands can increase the reach and impact of their sales and marketing campaigns, reinforce brand equity, and, most importantly, build better relationships with their customers.

But as the saying goes, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Before you can improve the omnichannel experience, you first need to unify and track your customer data from every channel using a solution like a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Specific omnichannel measurements help you understand the consistency and quality of your overall brand experience.

Here are the top 5 metrics you should pay attention to for a better understanding of omnichannel customer behavior.

1. Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value (LTV) is the measure of a customer’s actual or likely spend with your business. In general, LTV directly corresponds to the loyalty of your customer base to your brand—so it’s a critical metric for understanding the overall health of your business.

It’s impossible to measure true LTV with siloed, channel-based reporting systems. By unifying and standardizing your customer data into a single customer view, you can easily track LTV to understand which audiences and experiences are driving the most value for your brand.

2. Recency and repurchase rates

In retail, timing is everything. Customers who’ve purchased recently are more likely to purchase from you again if you target them with timely, relevant messages.

However, accurately tracking recency is impossible when your purchasing data is kept in channel-based silos. If you’re only tracking recency on ecommerce, for example, you could end up running a win-back campaign to customers who’ve recently purchased from one of your retail stores.

For an effective omnichannel retargeting strategy, you need to track both the timing of a customer’s last purchase through any channel. Understanding the varying repurchase rates of different channels, products, and customer audiences can help you hone the timing of your marketing to maximize results.

3. Customer satisfaction

High levels of customer satisfaction have been proven to lead to revenue growth. Because customer satisfaction is a measure of the customer’s emotional response to brand interactions and requires active input from customers, it can be a bit difficult to measure.

The most common strategy for measuring customer satisfaction is through Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. NPS is measured by sending out a customer survey that asks a single question: “On a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend [brand name] to a friend or colleague?” You can identify strengths and weaknesses in your products, marketing, service, and overall brand experience by analyzing the differences in these between customers who gave a high score and those who gave a low score.

However, it’s difficult to gauge those differences from NPS Scores alone. To collect more insight into the reasons behind high and low scores, you need to ask additional qualifying questions along with the traditional NPS. Lexer’s built-in Secure Forms feature allows you to easily augment NPS surveys with additional questions and unify survey responses as attributes on individual customer profiles.

4. Ticket volume

Tickets alert your service teams to problematic elements of the customer experience.

By combining your ticket data from every channel into streamlined customer profiles within a CDP, you can begin to identify customer segments that submit the highest number of tickets, as well as the time of day those tickets are sent, the channels through which tickets are submitted, and the types of tickets that are submitted most frequently.

Analyzing this information from an omnichannel perspective can help you draw actionable insights for improving the customer experiences you offer. If you find, for example, that the segments who submit the highest number of tickets also tend to be low-value, then you might consider suppressing similar audiences from your acquisition targeting. Or, if high-value customers are submitting the highest number of tickets, then you may need to rework aspects of your brand experience to keep those customers happy.

5. Customer profitability

Customer profitability is a measure of the total profit you’ve earned from a customer, taking into account both the gross revenue earned and the associated costs of creating the product, acquiring the customer, and fulfilling orders.

Because there are so many variables involved in calculating customer profitability, it can be an incredibly difficult metric to track without a sophisticated, omnichannel reporting tool like the one within the Lexer CDP. A very simplified version of the profitability calculation looks like this:

Sales – Returns – Product Costs – Acquisition Costs – Fulfilment Costs = Customer Profitability

Once you understand the relative profitability of different customer segments, you’ll learn where to focus your budget for the highest return. For example, high-value, high-margin segments are full of highly engaged customers who frequently buy full-priced products from your brand, so you should focus on them first to increase profitability. On the other hand, low-value, low-margin customers don’t purchase often, and the products they do purchase tend to be at a discount, so you should avoid allocating your budget toward acquiring and growing these customers.

Ultimately, the only way to track and optimize omnichannel metrics effectively is by working with a unified, standardized, customer-centric dataset. CDPs take a customer-centric approach to data collection, management, and analysis, making them the perfect tool for omnichannel businesses.

The full version of this article was originally published on Lexer.io. If you liked this, you’ll probably find more value in the original, in-depth version too. Click here to read the full version of “5 Omnichannel Metrics Every Customer-First Brand Should Measure.”