Happy customers are the backbone of any successful business. But not every customer will be satisfied with your services at all times. There would always be a few indifferent individuals and some others that disapprove of your product or services.
While the situation is inevitable, it’s also essential to know how many of your customers are actually happy with you. You want to know the percentage of happy and unhappy customers and what made them feel the way they do about your business.
Customer Experience: The Gamechanger for Most Companies
Customer experience can be understood as the overall experience a customer has with your brand – starting from the first interaction to the various stages in the sales funnel and even after-sales services like customer support.
However, it often happens that companies are incredibly hands-on until a lead turns into a customer, but the after-sales experience, especially customer service, gets ignored.
Unfortunately, poor customer service can lead to churn, creating a leaky bucket syndrome that’s hard to fix. You will earn customers and not retain them unless you build a holistic customer experience strategy that focuses on customer service.
According to an article in the European Business Review, 88% of companies prioritize customer experience in their contact center. Furthermore, customer experience has emerged as a key differentiator for most businesses, neck to neck with price and quality, making it more important than ever to track your customers’ happiness quotient and address their pain points promptly.
In this post, we will introduce you to 7 customer experience metrics that will help you track and improve your CX strategy:
1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT is one of the most popular tools for measuring whether a customer is satisfied with your product, services, or even a one-time interaction. The simple metric is easy to implement and can be adapted to meet your organization’s particular needs.
The above image shows what a CSAT survey might look like. You can measure CSAT across business processes to gauge your customers’ opinions on various topics, such as the buying process, customer service experience, customer onboarding, and their overall perception of your brand.
Such a process helps you identify the roadblocks in your customer journey and iron out the creases to create a smoother customer experience. Facebook and Google ratings are also examples of CSAT.
One innovative way to take CSAT is to ask customers face-to-face about what they really think. A CX-driven video chat software can be extremely helpful here. You can ask your customers to share a few words on what they feel about the product or service. In the end, you can ask for a rating. This way, you’ll get a numerical score as well as constructive feedback from customers.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Along with CSAT, NPS is the most popularly employed tool for measuring customer satisfaction. NPS is popular because it’s simple to use and relatively accurate. Most NPS surveys simply ask the customer how likely they’re to recommend your business to a friend or colleague. Customers can mark their responses on a sliding scale of 1 to 10, giving you a good idea of whether you’ve been able to create positive experiences or not.
Typically, NPS is considered a more accurate loyalty metric compared to CSAT surveys. You can use NPS to collect customer feedback and fine-tune your business strategy accordingly. Once you have received the customer responses, you can use the NPS methodology to divide them into Detractors (0-6), Passives (7-8), and Promoters (9-10).
The Detractors are unhappy customers who’re likely to hurt your brand through negative word-of-mouth publicity. The Passives are indifferent to your brand and generally satisfied with it.
However, they might be swayed by the competition. The third category, Promoters, is the most important. These are the people who will stick to your brand and refer it to friends and family, too. Constantly monitoring and improving NPS has become a crucial part of CX now!
3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score or CES is a relatively new metric, but it’s simple to use and a great source of actionable data to put things in perspective quickly. Typically, a good customer experience is frictionless. That’s why you want your customers to be able to interact with your brand as effortlessly as possible.
With a CES survey, you can swiftly glean insights into the efficacy of such systems. For instance, CES asks a question like: “How easy was it for you to get in touch with our company today?” Simple options like “Easy”, “Difficult”, “Could be easier”, etc., are included in the survey so users can click and share their experiences effortlessly. Alternatively, a point-scale system can be used so users can rate their experience on a sliding scale of 1 to 5.
If you’re still wondering why CES is important, HBR reveals that trying too hard to please your customers isn’t good enough. Instead, focussing on providing an effortless experience leads to higher brand loyalty.
4. Employee Engagement
Happy employees create satisfied customers. Therefore, tracking employee satisfaction is the first step to creating an outstanding customer experience. For instance, you can have regular surveys in your office to find out how your employees feel about the various processes.
Additionally, it’s important to introduce regular training sessions to keep them engaged and invest in their personal growth to keep them motivated. Generally, satisfied employees feel more involved in their roles and provide better customer service.
5. Social Media Monitoring
Customers from all age groups are increasingly using social media to share their thoughts and opinion about various brands. For your business, this is a tremendous opportunity to collect user data and find out more about their perception of your brand.
For starters, it’s essential to pay attention to how customers choose to interact with you. By measuring the contact volume for each channel, you can figure out the preferred service channels and work towards augmenting them. Even if social media doesn’t figure in the top contact channels (which is unlikely), it’s worth investing in a social listening tool to find out what customers are saying about your brand.
Social listening tracks the number of times your brand is mentioned on various channels and if they are positive or negative. It also allows you to jump into the conversation, if needed, to pacify a frustrated customer or repair a relationship.
6. Overall Resolution Rate
When a customer has a question or complaint, your aim is to close the loop and resolve the issue as soon as possible. If you do not respond in a timely manner or fail to provide adequate support, the customer is likely to churn.
A high-resolution rate points to the efficacy of your customer service team. You can calculate your overall resolution rate by dividing the total number of tickets in a period by the number of tickets solved.
7. Churn Rate
Just like conversion rate, churn rate is an important metric to measure. Remember the leaky bucket syndrome we mentioned? Now, you’ve already heard that acquiring customers is much more expensive than retaining them. Besides, if your customers keep churning, your user base will hardly grow despite an increasing acquisition rate.
Therefore, the churn rate is an important metric that tells you how many of your customers have stopped using your product or service. It can be calculated as the percentage of lost customers in a defined period.
The Bottomline
Measuring customer satisfaction is critical, but you don’t have to employ multiple CX metrics unless you want to. What’s important is to understand the kind of feedback you need from your customers and how you’re going to use it before choosing the right metrics for your purpose.
About the Author
Kashyap Trivedi is a passionate Content Creator and Digital Marketer. He likes to talk about recent trends in marketing, advertising, and customer experience. When he is not working you’ll find him playing Table Tennis or Meditating.
