- Connect Omnichannel Customer Data
Your customers view each interaction with your organisation as a continuous journey as they achieve specific goals, such as a health insurance member enrolling in a chronic care management program. They expect frictionless and connected experiences no matter which channel they choose to engage in next.
Without measuring cross-channel experiences, it’s extremely challenging to uncover customer goals and learn how they go about achieving them, in addition to discovering any friction points they encounter.
But often, measuring customer experience across channels is difficult because of siloed data that lives within countless systems and databases, each owned by different business functions. Overcoming challenges with omnichannel analytics is daunting, but you can start small and expand your scope over time.
Begin by focusing on connecting the touchpoints you own. For example, contact centre leaders can attain immediate value by first integrating IVR, chat and call data, before later moving on to add website, mobile and product data.
Some enterprises prioritise investments in analytics and data science teams to integrate omnichannel customer data. Others use solutions like customer journey analytics, which allows analysts to build models and accelerate analysis, but also enables business users to visualise and measure cross-channel customer journeys without coding python or SQL scripts.
- Improve Voice of the Customer Measurement
Customer feedback and VoC programs are considered a best practice for CX measurement. These programs are valuable, but the way feedback is collected can be improved.
As discussed earlier, metrics like NPS are often measured in aggregate, by segment or channel. Further, these metrics are captured after isolated interactions, which don’t reflect your customers’ entire experience.
Instead of capturing feedback after one interaction, consider surveying your customers once their goal is complete.
For instance, an internet service provider (ISP) can survey customers once their Wi-Fi connectivity is restored, rather than after one phone call with support or after a technician visits. Sometimes one phone call or one visit from a technician doesn’t solve the problem.
This will also help you cut down on survey fatigue, which is rapidly increasing as response rates plummet. In fact, only 9% of consumers will take the time to thoughtfully respond to your VoC surveys.
By altering when and how you collect customer feedback, you can better understand that feedback and draw a direct line from voice of the customer metrics to business outcomes.
- Measure Customer Experience in Real Time
If your customer abandons their goal or doesn’t complete your survey, you haven’t measured anything. You need real-time metrics that predict the likelihood each customer will reach their goal and have a positive experience. This is crucial for optimising CX and business success.
To understand why, let’s go back to the mortgage example.
Submitting an application is an essential step in getting a mortgage. Measuring abandonment and completion rates is a perfect indicator of customer success (getting a mortgage) and business success (acquiring new clients). If you measure these metrics in real time, you’ll know when abandonment rises too high so you can investigate the issue, intervene and help customers submit their applications.
This is an example of how CX measurement enables experiences to be improved in real time using customer journey orchestration. After all, your customers expect you to know when they encounter a problem. And that you’ll fix it quickly or give them an alternative route to reach their goal.
But if you’re unaware of obstacles in your customers paths, you can’t intervene and make things easier. Measuring experiences as they happen is crucial to satisfaction, trust and loyalty.
Further, real-time CX measurement helps you prioritise opportunities for improvement. If you can measure CX in real time, you’ll always know which initiatives will impact experience and business metrics. This way, you won’t spend time optimising issues that don’t affect as many customers – or don’t affect them as acutely – as another problem.
5 Customer Experience Metrics Every CX Pro Should Know
CX professionals have a wide variety of metrics to choose that represent the health of customer experience.
Let’s take a deeper look at five of the most popular customer experience metrics.
- Net Promoter Score
NPS shows the percentage of your customers who would recommend you to others — friends, family or colleagues.
It’s the most well-recognised customer experience metric that there is. It is also the simplest. NPS is typically measured by asking the following question:
How likely are you to recommend [business] to a friend or colleague?
Customers rate your company on a scale of 0–10. Respondents are grouped in the following categories:
- Promoters (Score 9–10)
- Passives (Score 7–8)
- Detractors (Score 0–6)
To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of detractors from promoters.
- Customer Satisfaction
CSAT is the mean or average satisfaction score of customers for a given experience.
It’s typically measured by an automated survey that asks customers to rate an experience such as a product return, a customer care call or a password change through an auto-generated post-interaction survey. The scale typically ranges from Very Satisfied to Not at All Satisfied.
CSAT can be used as an immediate reaction of users’ to a product or service experience. Many enterprises use CSAT as an overall performance indicator. For instance, how satisfied are customers in general?
But CSAT is most useful when measuring customers’ happiness when achieving their specific goals rather than after isolated interactions within a singular channel.
- Customer Effort Score
Customer effort score determines the relative effort required by the customer to work through an interaction.
This interaction could be a simple one such as looking for a product or a more difficult one such as resolving a technical issue. It’s usually measured on a defined scale through an automated post-interaction survey.
For instance, you could ask, “How much effort did you have to put in to resolve this issue?” and the responses could vary from Very low effort to Very high effort.
Effort is a good metric to measure whether your efforts to reduce customer experience obstacles are bearing fruit or not. Customers are looking for quick and convenient resolution to problems and resent having to expend a lot of effort to complete a product or service-related task.
4. First-Contact Resolution
Every contact centre professional has heard the acronym FCR, but what does it mean? First contact resolution is the ability to resolve customer issues on the first attempt, with no follow-up needed.
FCR is a clear way at looking at a call centre interaction through your customers’ eyes. Most people don’t enjoy repeatedly calling companies to address issues. They want their questions answered and issue resolved the first time they reach out.
Many organisations use FCR to measure efficiency and effectiveness. Solving problems the first time that consumers contact your business mitigates support costs. And resolving issues without extra contacts is a sign they’re trained properly and can serve customers effectively.
Most importantly, FCR has a major impact on customer satisfaction and effort, as well as revenue. American consumers will pay 17% more to purchase from a company with a reputation for great service.
Customer service is a critical moment of truth. It plays a major role in how customers perceive your brand and their decision to churn or remain a customer.
To gain an accurate measure of FCR, you need to avoid using arbitrary definitions to determine whether the issue has been resolved, such as no further calls within 48 hours. FCR should be determined after confirming the customer’s issue has been resolved because they’ve completed their journey. Using a mortgage example, this would be that the loan has been approved and the funds have been issued, rather than the customer stopped calling with questions about their application.
5. Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) aims to quantify the total value or worth of a customer over their entire relationship with your organisation. As Forrester notes, lifetime value “is gaining traction as customer insights professionals seek to maximise efficiency, demonstrate economic value, and leverage advances in data management for strategic purposes like customer experience improvement.”
Lifetime value is considered the best metric to predict how much money your business can count on from every customer. It’s essential for long-term planning and enables CX leaders to prioritise initiatives that can increase lifetime value for each customer.
There are other metrics that fall under categories but can also impact your customers’ experiences. One example is contact centre metrics, such as average handle time (AHT), repeat call rate, and wait or hold times. While these KPIs are operational, long hold times or having to call multiple times to resolve an issue can frustrate customers. And that affects CX metrics like satisfaction and ease.
The Evolution of CX Measurement
We’re in an experience economy in which a people-centric, empathetic approach is the only way to create a sustained competitive advantage.
Improving the way you measure customer experience is the key to listening and understanding your customers. And that’s key to building trust and loyalty.
How CX leaders measure customer experience is advancing as new technologies present obstacles and opportunities. It’s time to prioritise your customers and their goals first, then align your department and business KPIs and success metrics to those goals.
By taking a journey-based approach to CX measurement, you can enhance your ability to identify and improve pain points for every customer, achieve desired business outcomes and deliver the frictionless experiences your customers demand.
