Your organization’s primary differentiation is customer experience (CX). Over the last few years, customer expectation’s have changed tremendously. However, the way we measure customer experience isn’t keeping up.
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How to Measure and Improve Customer Experience?
Measuring customer experience is essential to understanding how customers feel about your product or service. It helps you identify areas for improvement, develop better strategies to meet customer needs, and create a positive customer experience.
There are four main methods to measure customer experience: surveys, customer feedback, focus groups, and analytics.
Surveys are the most common way to measure customer experience and allow you to gain insight into how customers feel about your product or service. They can be conducted online, over the phone, or in person and provide a quick and easy way to collect customer feedback.
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Customer feedback
It is another way to measure customer experience. This includes reviews on websites such as Yelp or Glassdoor, comments posted on social media, and emails sent directly from customers. These input types provide valuable insights into how customers view your business, products, and services.
Focus groups
Focus groups are an effective method for collecting qualitative data on customer experience. A focus group typically comprises 8-10 people with similar interests who can provide specific feedback about your company and its offerings. This feedback is invaluable in understanding customer experience and helping you decide how to improve it.
Analytics
It can provide quantitative data about the performance of your product or service. By analyzing customer interactions such as page views, click-through rates, and time spent on a page, you can gain insight into what customers are looking for and use that information to meet their needs better.
By measuring customer experience using these four methods, you can understand where you need improvement and develop strategies to create a positive customer experience. Additionally, setting up a process for regularly collecting customer feedback will enable you to continuously monitor customer satisfaction levels so that any issues can be addressed quickly and efficiently. With the right customer experience measurements and strategies, you can create an exceptional customer experience that will set your business apart from the competition.
Perception Metrics.
These metrics indicate what customers want from your company’s overall experience. This is how customers feel about their experience with your enterprise. Many CX leaders use surveys and text analytics to gauge customer sentiment. Voice of the Customer (VoC), which is a common way to gauge customer sentiment, often includes satisfaction, ease, and confidence.
Different types of metrics
Despite the large number of metrics that are used, most can be grouped into five categories.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Most companies start here. CSATs can be either an explicit capture of survey questions about customer satisfaction or implicit metrics such as product reviews, delivery statistics, and mystery shopping scores.
Customer loyalty/retention/churn.
These metrics can be retrospective, such as average tenure, or more predictive of the likelihood of a customer remaining a customer. Examples include purchase frequency, use of multiple channels, loyalty program participation, average order size, repeat orders and return rates.
Advocacy/reputation/brand.
These metrics determine the level at which customers would be willing to recommend or endorse the product or organization. You can use these metrics to determine price sensitivity, sentiment scores, trust ratings, and participation in events.
Quality/operations
The most underrated set of metrics. A poor customer experience can be caused by a product/service that does not meet the requirements. No matter how many steps are taken to fix the problem .
Employee engagement
Only 10% of CX initiatives include this fifth set of metrics. Gartner’s survey found that employee engagement is a significant concern when delivering CX improvement. 86% of respondents ranked it as having a greater impact than other CX issues.
Optimizing Customer Experience
While every CX leader measures customer experience KPIs and can link these metrics to business results, many do not have the tools to do so. These are the four ways journey measurement can be used to create empathy and personal experiences that improve CX and business results.
Customer-Centric
Customer experience professionals often discuss choosing metrics that capture value. But who is receiving this value? Consider your customer first and then your company.
Businesses have always set goals to increase digital containment rates and decrease service costs. These goals are important and can signal the health of your business. These goals do not capture the value your customers receive from your company. A customer-centric company means you first consider your customers’ goals, then align them with your business goals.
Customer goals must be included in your CX measurement framework. You can then align customer goals with CX metrics like Customer Effort Score, satisfaction, or NPS for every customer journey. You can monitor the metrics that impact your business goals, such as lifetime value and costs.
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Increase Voice of the Customer Measurement
VoC programs and customer feedback are considered best practices for CX measurement. While these programs are precious, the process of collecting feedback can be improved.NPS metrics, such as NPS, are often aggregated by segments or channels. These metrics can only be captured after a few interactions and reflect some of the customer experience. Instead of collecting feedback from one exchange, you can survey your customers after achieving their goals.
You can improve your understanding of customer feedback by changing how you collect it. This will allow you to draw a direct line between customer metrics and business outcomes.
Customer Experience Measured in Real Time
If your customer abandons your goal or does not complete your survey, you have not measured anything. Real-time metrics are needed to predict whether each customer will achieve their goal and provide a positive experience. This is critical for optimizing CX, and business success. Let’s look at the mortgage example to understand why.
A mortgage application must be submitted. Measurement of abandonment and completion rates can be a great indicator of customer success (getting mortgages) and business success (acquiring new clients). These metrics can be measured in real-time so that you know when abandonment is rising too fast and can intervene to help customers submit their applications.
Connect Omnichannel Customer Data
Customers view every interaction with you as a journey that leads to specific goals. For example, a health insurance customer is enrolled in a chronic care management plan. Customers expect seamless and connected experiences, regardless of the channel they choose. It’s easier to discover customer goals by measuring cross-channel interactions.
Start by connecting all touchpoints. Contact center managers can gain immediate value by integrating chat, IVR, and call data before adding website, mobile, and product data.
To integrate customer data from multiple channels, some enterprises prioritize data science and analytics. Other solutions include customer experience analytics, allowing analysts to create models and speed up analysis. It also enables business users to visualize cross-channel customer journeys and measure them without needing SQL scripts or coding.
