Creating a positive, memorable customer experience (CX) will create many long term benefits for your organization. After all, CX is ultimately a growth tool—and understanding your customer experience metrics and key performance can help you provide better service and expand your organization.
Investing in your CX and tracking your digital customer experience metrics pays off. According to HubSpot, when you address customer issues quickly and efficiently, clients are 2.4 times more likely to stick with your business. But not only does it encourage existing clients and customers to remain with you, but it also inspires them to spread the word. In fact, by lowering the customer effort score and making it easier for your customers to achieve their desired goal with your brand, customers become 76 percent more likely to refer or recommend your organization to their colleagues, family, and friends. Providing simple, straightforward, convenient products and services—and making their interactions with you in-person and online just as effortless, is key.
Creating a positive customer experience can help garner repeat business and lifelong customers. It’s also less expensive to retain existing customers than it is to win over new customers. But how do you know what steps to take to enhance your CX? What should you be tracking to discover how happy your customers are, where the pain points in your CX strategy are, and how to make improvements?
Here are key customer experience metrics for tracking the overall experience; the ones that can truly impact your overall CX plan and the approach you take to improve it.
What Are Customer Experience Metrics?
What are the metrics for customer experience, and how can we track them? Customer experience metrics can be explained as the key performance indicators (KPIs) that follow and track different parts of the customer experience. These customer experience KPI metrics can give you an impression of the overall quality of your customer experience—good, bad, or somewhere in between.
Waiting for post-interaction metrics to gaugehow you are doing with your customer experience management is not the ideal wayto manage your customer’s happiness with your organization, but there is valuein tracking some of the metrics along with using tools that manage journeys inreal time. Following the trajectory ofthese factors can give you a better idea of trend lines in your CX delivery totrack your progress over time.
Ultimately, creating and nurturing a positive CXis complex. That’s why you want to track different metrics to follow thedifferent aspects of customer experience. Here are a few metrics typically usedto monitor an organization’s customer experience quality.
1. Net Promoter Score
Your net promoter score (NPS) tracks customer satisfaction, specifically how likely customers are to recommend or refer your organization to others. This is a commonly-used metric used to better understand customer loyalty and make improvements.
Some metrics, like customer satisfaction score or customer effort score, look at how customers feel about a brand in general, rather than based on one unique interaction or a single purchase, as is the case with your NPS.
So, how does an organization arrive at its Net Promotor Score? Your NPS is based on a single question, asking customers to rank how likely they are to refer your brand to a friend based on their interaction from 0-10. Based on their answer, customers are broken down into three categories for how they might promote your brand:
● Promoter (9-10)
● Passive (7-8)
● Detractor (0-6)
Your NPS is a quantitative metric to understand how your customers feel at a point in time. You may want to get more in-depth, qualitative detail by asking customers to leave feedback in the form of a comment. By doing so, you can get a better idea of which pain points need to be addressed and how to improve.
2. Customer Satisfaction Score
One of the most direct ways to understand your overall CX is through the customer satisfaction score or CSAT. This customer satisfaction score evaluates your customer service performance metrics.
The CSAT is a fast, simple survey asking clients and customers how satisfied they were based on their interaction. CSAT is an average of all of these scores put together. This could be purchasing a product or service, but it could also be after they make the purchase, asking about how pleased they are with the product or service. Additionally, customer service performance metrics examples may include talking to a customer service representative in an online chat or interacting with a chatbot to get assistance with a particular issue.
Here’s why this matters–support interactions and customer service KPI metrics are very critical aspects of your customer experience. CX is not just about making initial sales, it’s about developing loyal, lifelong customers who know you can help them if they get in a bind. That’s why CSAT scores can also be calculated (and tracked) following a customer service interaction.
3. Customer Effort Score
Your customer effort score (CES) evaluates just how easy it was for customers to interact with you—something you want to be as easy as possible.
Why does this matter? According to Gartner, “Customer effort is the strongest driver of customer loyalty—or disloyalty.” It’s about keeping customers.
Customers are four times more likely to feel more disloyal to a company after a service interaction than they are to feel more loyal. While 96 percent of customers who rank an experience as high-effort become more disloyal and may speak negatively about your brand, only 9 percent of customers with a low-effort experience are likely to become disloyal.
High-effort experiences can be categorized as:
● Channel switching
● Repeating information
● Providing generic service
● Service transfers
● The need to repeat interactions to address the same issue
Your CES is a highly-accurate way to understand how hard your customers have to work when they interact with your brand and their overall impression of your organization. It’s been reported that customer effort is reportedly 40 percent more accurate at understanding customer loyalty compared to customer satisfaction. It’s an essential metric to track to thoroughly understand the whole customer experience.
4. Customer Journey Analytics
Another tool you can use to track and better understand your overall customer experience is your customer journey analysis. Your customer journey details every touchpoint in the customer experience and gives you an in-depth look at all the ways your customers interact with your organization and how they are connected.
Its important to note here that most CXM platforms provide information after a customer has run into an issue, struggled with a particular touch point, or faced some kind of frustration. However, with the ever-morphing, heightened expectations of customers, this may be too late to retain the relationship. Without real-time data to act upon in the moment, customer experience metrics are really just post-mortem information. To prevent poor customer experiences, brands now need to orchestrate, guide and optimize the entire customer journey in real-time, as they happen--which only OvationCXM can provide.
CXM Engine is the first CXM platform to expand real-time visibility, collaboration and communication to every team involved in a customer journey, connecting them together so they can work as a single unit to serve the customer. The resulting customer journey analytics are more actionable because they come from having real-time visibility into a customer’s journey progress from end-to-end. Having a holistic, unified view of a customer’s experience lets you analyze and work to solve common pain points like:
• Consistent points of friction
• Repeating causes of friction
• Problems with handoffs between teams or with partners
• Confusing or lacking instructions and information for both customers but also for the teams that serve them
• Gaps in communication between teams and with customers that leave them in the dark about who’s responsible for next steps.
5. Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value, also called CLV or CLTV, gives you an idea of the total revenue you can expect from a single customer, client, or account during the life of their relationship with your organization.
This is achieved by tracking a customer revenue value and comparing it to the predicted lifespan, or how long they will interact with your brand.
Why is this so significant? The longer a customer stays with you, the more revenue they can generate for your organization, which all boils down to the CX.
Tracking the CLV can help you make more informed business decisions. One example of this would be to use CLV scores to determine which customer segments stand to be the most valuable to your organization. You can use this information to target your marketing efforts toward leads that fit into these same customer segments.
Your Real-Time Customer Experience Partner
The bottom line? Your customer experience can make a huge impact on your organization’s success. So learning of problems or big frustrations after they happen and the customer is already walking out the door is devastating and can affect profitability, growth and revenue. Today, competition in financial services is too tough to risk losing your own customers to poor experiences or failing to gain new ones because you’ve made it too difficult, slow, confusing or maddening to work with you.
Remember: 72 percent of consumers will share a positive CX with at least 6 people—but 13 percent of consumers who have a customer experience that leaves them unhappy will share that with 15 or more people.
Your overall customer experience is too essential and too important to leave to chance. Tracking important metrics is a report card, of sorts, to ensure your end-to-end journeys are as optimal as they can be. Coupled with a platform like CXMEngine that allows you to design, monitor, guide and even tweak journeys on the fly, all in real time, you can reimagine, refine, and reinvigorate the customer experience. To learn more, connect with our team today!
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