Next Gen Customer Experience Metrics? Goosebumps and Double-taps!

 

We keep asking: how do you measure customer experience?

As if it’s something objective. As if the way someone feels about a product can be reduced to a line on a dashboard. 

We’ve spent years obsessing over KPIs, Net Promoter Scores, and elaborate customer journey maps. But none of it answers the only question that matters: Did it move them? In a world flooded with options, attention spans, and AI-generated everything, the only true signals left are the ones you feel in your skin, and the ones people can't help but tap twice. Goosebumps and double-taps aren’t just reactions. They’re the future of customer experience, and the only metrics that will matter in the decade ahead.

Here’s the problem: most companies measure what’s easy, not what matters.

Response time is easy. Empathy isn’t. Page load speed is easy. Wonder isn’t.

Think of Apple’s unboxing experience. Or Amazon’s “Buy Now” button. Or how Spotify just gets your taste in music without asking. No one fills out a form saying “I was deeply moved.” But they come back. They tell their friends. They form a habit. That’s experience. And it’s not rational.

Want a real measure of customer experience? Look at: do they come back without a reminder? Are they talking about you without being paid to? Are they quietly disappearing? Did anyone say “this made my day”?

Sometimes the signal comes from things you can’t quantify at all—like when someone pauses after using your product and just says: “That was nice.”

The irony is that the more companies chase metrics, the less human they become. They optimize for scores, not stories. For numbers, not nuance. They miss the edges—the unexpected parts where trust and emotion live.

And no one ever got goosebumps from filling out a survey.

So, what do you do instead? Talk to customers like a human, not a researcher. Ask them how they feel, not what they rate. Watch them use your product without guidance. Their confusion will teach you more than any metric. Follow behavior more than feedback. People don’t always say what they do, and they rarely do what they say.

In the end, experience isn’t data. It’s memory. Emotion. Whether they felt like someone on the other end actually gave a damn.

That’s how you know if the experience is working.

You’ll feel it.

So stop trying to measure goosebumps. Start trying to cause them.