How to measure Customer Experience
Customer Experience is the overall feeling you leave with your customers after their interaction with you, a projection of their experience on how they think of you as a brand and the only way that could ultimately lead to brand loyalty.
Customer Experience can be measured and improved, beyond the surveys. How? With the power of AI.
A power that analyzes unstructured data, like calls, emails chats, and data that you already have in your database.
Sounds like an absolute necessity, right?
Dead right, so let’s have a look at the steps you will need to make and the metrics to give you the right answers for your customer experience.
1. Make sure that you know how much they like your brand.
This is a customer satisfaction benchmark to understand how likely your customers are to recommend you to a friend. To find this out, you send a survey to your customers and ask them how likely they are to recommend you to a friend, on a scale of 0-10.
This is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the main methods to measure customer experience. Your NPS will let you know the percentage of customers that love, are neutral or aren’t a fan of your brand (0-6 are detractors, 7-8 are passives, and 9-10 are promoters). To find your NPS, subtract the percentage of detractor responses from promoter responses. With this score, you can instantly tell how many customers are happy enough with their Customer Experience that they’ve become ambassadors for your brand. Once you have that information, you can work on improving the customer experience for those that are passive or detractors.
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2. Use the right Customer Experience metric at the right point in the customer journey.
Another technique to measure the Customer Experience is to use your analytics to look at the customer journey. However, before you can gather this data, you’ll want to have a complete understanding of your customer journey. If you haven’t already, creating a customer journey map is a really helpful way to get this done, giving you a visual representation of the process a customer goes through to achieve a goal with your company.
A customer journey map should answer questions about customer motivations, needs, and pain points and help you understand all the touchpoints a customer experiences on their journey. This is how you’ll gather customer journey analytics.
3. Find those touchpoints.
Once you understand all the possible touchpoints, you can gather analytics surrounding your customer’s experience as social media, ads, website, company events, product reviews, onboarding, customer loyalty programs, emails, and surveys. Then, you can create a page or tab on your customer journey map dedicated to reporting the metrics of your touchpoints, so you can analyze your customer journey experience. Doing this should help you answer questions like, “Where are my customers experiencing the most friction?” or “How can I better support my customers?” and meet currently unmet needs and provide a better customer experience.
4. Ask around.
Besides looking at analytics, the best way to understand your customer experience is to talk to your customers. One way you can do this is through surveys. During various parts of the customer journey, you should send out surveys and feedback forms. It’s important to note that not all surveys should be or need to be focused on NPS. In addition to NPS and customer satisfaction, you can send out surveys to ask questions about user experience or ask your customers for product or feature requests.
5. Check how many are leaving you.
Churn rate is the percentage of your customers or subscribers who cancel or don’t renew their subscriptions during a given time period. While churn is inevitable, it’s still important that you learn why churn is happening in your company so you can reduce it as much as possible.
To determine your churn rate, designate a time period and divide the number of customers who churned by the total number of customers acquired, and multiply that decimal by 100% to calculate your churn rate. This is a metric that should help you find out why customers are leaving and it goes without saying that, measuring and analyzing your churn rate should help you improve your customer experience.
6. Check the trends with your CS.
To learn more about your customer experience, you should dive deep into your customer support and identify the trends, i.e. the recurring pain points of your customers and try to improve them. You might need to create more straightforward instructions, shorter click paths, guiding videos. When it comes to metrics, you should make sure to monitor the amount of time it takes for a customer to get a response from support or average handling time.
7. Measure customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction is a great way to get immediate feedback on whether a customer enjoyed their experience. If you have a low customer satisfaction score, you can begin to improve the customer experience. The customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is one of the most straightforward ways of measuring your customer experience. To calculate it, all you need to do is send a survey immediately following a purchase or interaction, depending on your business. This survey will ask “How satisfied were you with your experience?” and provide a corresponding survey scale. The CSAT is the average score of that survey.
Yes, customer experience can sometimes feel abstract and hard to measure, but make sure that putting the right metrics into action can help make the abstract more understandable and concrete. And as you know, you can only learn how to improve your customer experience once you begin measuring it.
And one final tip; don’t measure for the sake of measuring. Measure to grow your business.