Measuring the customer experience – it is something that every company should be actively doing to determine whether or not the customer is truly satisfied with their products or services. Perhaps you have already launched such initiatives within your environment. If so, are you building a better relationship with your customers? If you aren’t clearly able to measure improvements with customer satisfaction, it may be time to take a closer look at customer experience metrics to understand what and how you should measure.
Customer Experience Metrics: The Net Promoter Score
Your marketing and promotions divisions are responsible for promoting your brand and your products or services to your target market. What if your target market could do the same? The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a common customer experience metric used in companies throughout multiple industries to gauge the likelihood of a customer recommending your company or product to someone else. In terms of customer experience metrics, the NPS will capture some of the emotional loyalty and benchmark information when interacting with the customer.
Customer Experience Metrics: Capturing Satisfaction
Customer experience metrics often include measuring satisfaction. It is not uncommon for companies like yours to engage customers in a survey that will ask questions such as, “how satisfied do you feel with product XYZ?” Otherwise known as CSAT, customer satisfaction surveys do capture the perception of the customer, but some argue that it lacks the necessary emotion that could signal a potential deflector. If the customer reports satisfaction, yet still moves to the competition, your sales rep is likely to feel blindsided.
The Customer Experience Index in Customer Experience Metrics
While both the NSP and the CSAT are employed by companies all over the world to measure the customer experience, Forrester Research found there to be a gap in the complete measurement of overall customer experience. The Customer Experience Index (CxPi) was developed in 2007 to address this cap and enables organizations to benchmark their measured customer experience against that of competitors or across other industries. The CxPi aims to gauge the customer’s experience in terms of usefulness or meeting needs, ease of use and enjoyability.
What to do with Customer Experience Metrics After You Measure
Once you use customer experience metrics to capture a true picture of the customer experience, you need to compare the results against your baseline performance. In other words, what is the acceptable level of quality and performance that a customer will accept? How did the measured experience fail, meet or exceed that baseline? Interpreting the results depends greatly upon the method of measurement. If you used a survey to measure satisfaction, you may not capture the customer’s likelihood to be a repeat buyer. If you measured NSP, you may have missed the opportunity to identify a gap in the ease of use or even enjoyability.
Taking Action with Customer Experience Metrics
If you didn’t put customer experience metrics in place to identify areas for improvement in your processes or products, why are you wasting your time? There are too many vendors in your industry who will provide what your customer needs; take the customer experience metrics and build on the customer relationship. You do this by offering additional products or services that can meet the customer’s needs; recommending training sessions or add-ons that can increase the enjoyability of the product; and notify the customer of any updates or enhancements.
Customers want to be catered to and your customer experience metrics puts you in the perfect position to deliver the optimal experience.