There are so many factors that form the measurement of customer experience.With Customer Experience (CX) fast becoming the best way to stand out in a crowded marketplace and build trust, increasing numbers of businesses are focussing on their customer strategy.
When it comes to measuring customer experience, there are a number of metrics used to judge how satisfied customers really are, including: customer feedback, net promoter scores, customer effort scores and customer satisfaction scores.
So where should you start when it comes to either building a customer experience strategy from scratch, or improving an existing one?
In this blog, we’ll review why it’s so important for the growth of your business to utilise different methods of listening to your customers and gaining feedback from them, and the best methods to measure customer experience and build customer experience metrics into your ongoing KPIs.
Why is it important measure customer experience?
Before diving into all the different strategies used for measuring customer experience (one of the most important aspects to business growth), you need to understand why it is important in the first place.
Customer experience measurement refers to how well you please your customers and meet their needs across all the touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey.
Without measuring customer experience, you’re playing a guessing game that will only end in you losing (a bit like the roulette wheel at a casino!). You need to effectively measure your customer experience otherwise you will not successfully meet your customers’ needs or maximise repeat business.
Check out our customer impact scorecard to see how your strategy is helping you achieve your goals, and what could be missing!
What metrics are used to measure customer experience?
You NEED customer feedback and reviews to be able to measure customer satisfaction and overall experience.
How are you supposed to know whether your customers are happy or not? Assume? Absolutely not! It’s important to know how to measure all of these, so here are some effective ways of measuring your customer’s experience and customer satisfaction!
Key metrics in customer experience
Which metrics are right for you depend entirely on what you’re trying to achieve. It’s a good idea to start here; by looking at the objectives of the business and what the customer experience strategy needs to bring to the table to support the business in achieving its goals.
Once you know what good looks like, you can consider which areas to focus on and how you’ll need to measure improvements to the customer experience. Setting the right customer experience metrics early on can help ensure everyone knows the priorities.
Customer experience metrics can be broken down into two main types:
- score-based metrics derived from consumer sentiment
- feedback from an automated survey, and more strategic metrics derived from internal business data.
Due to the ‘hit-and-miss’ nature of surveys, low response rates, and the business driven timing of most surveys, we’d usually recommend focusing on a blend of the two types to help build a more consistent and accurate picture of loyalty.
Feedback and reviews
Gaining customer feedback and reviews is essential to customer experience measurement.
A great way of measuring customer experience and customer satisfaction is reading your reviews and taking in any feedback you receive, good or bad. This will help you stay on the right track and improve or develop and strategies going forward.
However, you can’t just assume that your customers are happy because they haven’t left a negative review.
Think about how many customers haven’t left reviews or said anything, this is because:
“Recent studies show 96 percent of customers will not complain” (marketingconnectionsinc.com)
This is an alarming statistic, especially when trying to gain CX metrics. However, this just goes to show how important customer experience is and the importance of putting a great strategy in place.
Take note of feedback you receive on multiple channels too, not just Google. Customers could be talking about your brand indirectly on social media and it’s important to keep up with people’s opinion of your business. It’s also a great opportunity to address any issues you find with empathy and understanding, while also thanking loyal customers that are advocates of your brand.
Net promoter score (NPS)
A net promoter score (NPS) is a tool widely used market research tool that helps you to measure customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. You will have definitely been asked this or seen this before as a customer.
How do you measure NPS?
NPS measures customer loyalty by asking how likely it is that you would recommend a company, service or product to a friend/family/colleague.
A net promoter score is one of the customer experience metrics used to measure customer loyalty, as it’s a fast way of gaining knowledge into how satisfied you’ve made your customers. Usually, a score of 1-6 is typically seen as not impressed and not likely to refer to a friend.
A score of 7-8 is seen as ‘passive’ (their feelings are neutral) and, again. not likely to refer a friend even though the score is higher. A score of 9-10 is perfect and is classed as a ‘promoter’. These customers have been so pleased with their experience that they are likely to promote the company to family and friends.
Remember, NPS is the % of detractors subtracted from the % of promoters, and is just a number (from -100 to +100) and isn’t a percentage!
Customer churn rate
Customer churn rate is the rate of customers that do not return and stopped buying from your business or cancelled a subscription over a given period of time.
How do you measure Churn Rate?
Basic churn rate is calculated by determining the number of customers lost during a certain timeframe and dividing it by the total number of customers at the start.
Churn is inevitable for any business but it is still important to learn why it happens. This could happen due to the price of your product/service compared to competitors, a negative experience due to customer service or just not being convenient for your customers anymore.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The Customer Effort Score, or CES , measures how much effort customers have to exert to reach their goals. Whether that’s ordering a product from your website, getting their question answered, an issue resolved, or returning a product.
So how do you measure customer effort score?
Well, sending out a survey and asking your customers these questions can help you receive useful feedback and honest responses. It can help you improve your processes and make everything more streamlined for your customers.
Some examples of these questions include:
- Did you find the product you needed easily?
- Was our website easy to navigate?
- Was the checkout process simple to follow?
- How helpful was our customer service team today?
Customer satisfaction score
Customer satisfaction score is another one of the customer experience metrics and is the average score given to your company according to customer answers based on a survey. Companies use CSAT scores to find out how satisfied customers were with specific products/services.
CSAT is simply the % of satisfied respondents (for example, 4 0r 5 out of 5 is deemed to be a ‘satisfied’ score, so if 50 out of 100 customers score 4 or higher, your CSAT is 50%!).
These can be hugely helpful in seeing where you’re successful and unsuccessful in the customer journey and where you can improve.
Contact resolution
Contact resolution measures how well agents can solve customer queries the first time using surveys or statistical evaluations. First contact resolution shows the number of customer support requests resolved during the first interaction. If customers aren’t able to get their queries resolved the first time they contact you, they probably won’t be satisfied or become loyal, which in turn increases churn rate.
How do you use Customer Experience metrics?
Customer-centric companies are not intimidated to receive customer feedback in all forms because the data holds the potential to improve every aspect of the business.
However, not all data is created equal—and neither are the methods for collecting it. Sending too many surveys, asking irrelevant questions or asking at the wrong times can really throw your results off.
If you want to collect honest, helpful data then you need to ask questions that give you a straightforward answer and don’t take too long for your customers to fill out. Give your customers an incentive to participate, like entering them into a competition to win vouchers or prizes in exchange for their honest feedback.
Don’t wait too long to ask customers how their experience was either, otherwise this will likely be ignored and customers may have even forgotten what their purchase was.
Use cx metrics to improving the Customer Journey
Improving and measuring all the touchpoints across the entire customer journey is essential to delivering the best possible customer experience.
If you need help identify the stages of the customer journey, read our blog here! The customer journey is made up of 5 stages and is used to track your customers through their journey to becoming loyal, returning customers.
A great way of figuring out what’s working and what’s not, is creating a customer journey map. A customer journey map visually shows you a breakdown of all stages that customers go through so you can look at each section in detail. This will help you to see start to finish how how a purchase happens and you can set goals to improve this journey.
For example, you may look at your customer journey analytics and see that you need to work on retaining your customers, so look at how you can meet their expectations and answer all their questions.
You may want to look at your ads, social media, website, emails or surveys and see how these all affect the customer journeys.
FAQs
What is customer obsession?
Customer obsession is more than just meeting customer’s expectations and improving customer satisfaction. Customer obsession refers to companies that are dedicated and obsess over creating outstanding customer experiences.
If you’re able to focus every aspect of your business on what your customers care about, you will see an influx of customers that trust your brand.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many ways to effectively measure customer experience and start improving all the individual touchpoints through your customer’s journey. With the right measurement system in place, you will see a huge jump in revenue growth and customer retention.
Need help transforming your customer experience? Contact us today!
To learn more about how customer experience influences your business, check out this blog post:
