Measuring your customer experience performance is essential to creating an exceptional customer journey. Like driving a car, if you can’t see what’s happening around you, how can you expect to stay on the road? Measuring and monitoring CX allows you to assess what is effective and what isn’t. How and what you measure depend greatly on the type of experience you would like to offer your customers.
Some of the main measurements of CX are:
- Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Sentiment
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Customer Churn Rate
- First Contact Resolution (FCR)
Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), measures short-term satisfaction, or how a customer feels about a specific product or service. CSAT is the average satisfaction score that customers rate a specific experience they had with your organisation, such as a billing enquiry or customer support call.
It’s generally measured by sending customers an automated survey on a website, IVR, smartphone, email or other channel, asking them to rate their level of satisfaction with the interaction on a scale of “Not satisfied at all” to “Very satisfied.”
A key benefit with CSAT is that it’s based on a relatively real time reaction to a customer’s satisfaction with a product or service as the aim is to try and get a CSAT score within 30 minutes of a product or service being used.
Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is measured on a single question based on a customers’ overall interaction with a company to measure customer loyalty. NPS is the percentage of your customers who would (or wouldn’t) recommend your company to their friends, family, or colleagues. It’s typically measured with a customer survey that asks the customer, “How likely are you to recommend this business to a friend or colleague?” Customers rate your company on a scale from 0-10. Your NPS score is calculated by subtracting the Detractors from the Promoters.
Customer Sentiment
Customer sentiment analysis is the measurement of positive and negative language, usually in text format, to determine the underlying emotional tone of the words. It is used to help brands understand the opinions, attitudes, and emotions expressed by their customers online, and is often applied to social media platforms.
Analysis of aggregated data over time provides insights into trends, while analysis of individual cases in near real time lets companies address and resolve customer issues quickly, making customer sentiment analysis a very powerful tool in creating a unique and positive customer experience.
Customer effort score
Customer effort score (CES) measures the effort required by your customers to accomplish a task. It’s typically measured by sending customers an automated post-interaction survey asking them to rate a specific statement on a defined scale. The statement will depend on the interaction they just completed. For a customer billing interaction, for example, you might ask “How much effort did you personally have to do to resolve your issue?” and have them rate the interaction on a scale ranging from “Very low effort” to “Very high effort.”
When it comes to service, companies can create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily. Customers resent having to contact a company repeatedly or be transferred to get an issue resolved, having to repeat information, and having to switch from one service channel to another. Equipped with this understanding, we can fundamentally change the emphasis of customer service interactions to remove obstacles for customers and make it easy for them to transact with your company.
Customer Churn Rate
Churn rate is measured by the percentage of customers who either don’t make a repeat purchase (for transaction-based businesses) or cancel their recurring service (for subscription-based businesses).
The churn rate is calculated by dividing the total number of lost customers by the total number of active customers for any given period of time. Regardless of how you choose to calculate churn, tracking your churn rate is critical to success. It’s almost always cheaper and easier to retain customers than it is to go through the process of acquiring new ones. Monitoring churn is the first step in understanding how good you are at retaining customers and identifying what actions might result in a higher retention rate.
First Contact Resolution
First Contact Resolution (FCR) measures the percentage of contacts where the customers issue was resolved on the first interaction with your company. A frequent pattern of multiple calls or contacts from the same customers means customer service isn’t being handled properly. Customer satisfaction goes up when needs are met more efficiently and effectively.
FCR can be a difficult metric to accurately measure as it looks at how customers perceive their experience and this information is not always easy to collect. Before companies can begin to measure FCR, they need to define what FCR means for them and establish criteria for measuring it. For example, FCR might be defined as resolving a case on the first call, regardless of whether the call needs to be transferred to another agent.
Once the FCR criteria has been set you need to define how much time you allocate for customers to follow up on a case before defining the contact as being resolved on the first contact (also known as a contact window).
Ultimately, every business is different and there’s no single metric that will work for every organisation in every industry. Whatever you decide on, just make sure you’re measuring the things that are most important to your customers, and that you can draw actionable insights that can be used to improve customer experience.
If you would like to learn more about any of the different ways to measure customer experience please contact us.
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