The quality of experience that your company offers to customers will underpin its success in all other areas. From providing staff training, to working with client focus groups — ensuring customers receive a streamlined and effective service will guarantee they return time and time again.However, when you’re working towards your CX goals, it can be hard to make sure you’re staying on track. If you’re wondering how to measure your progress and learn where to improve, here are 5 CX metrics for success:
Key metrics to boost your customer experience capabilities
NPS survey
If you’re looking for a simple survey that can tell you a lot about your clientele, then consider NPS surveys.By asking just 2 questions, a net promoter score survey can gather information on how customers perceive your brand, their experience working with you, and whether they’re likely to recommend you to others.
The first section should ask responders to rate your service out of 10. Clients who give you a higher rating are ‘promoters’, whereas those who give you a lower score are ‘detractors’. To calculate your NPS, simply find the difference between the percentage of promoters and percentage of detractors in your sample.
You may want to add a second section that asks responders to explain the reasons behind their score. This information should be used to shape your CX strategy, and therefore increase your NPS over time.
Customer retention
Ensuring your company has a loyal client base is vital for creating brand stability, so it’s important to consistently encourage repeat clients. To aid this, consider analysing your customer retention score, which measures the proportion of clients who stay with your company over time.
To calculate this value, you’ll need to decide on a defined time frame to take data from — such as the past financial year.Next, take the number of clients you have gained during the time frame, and subtract it from the total number of customers you had at the end of the time frame. Then, divide this figure by the number of customers you started the time frame with, and multiply the result by 100, to find your total customer retention percentage.
Your goal should be to raise this percentage over time, as this will indicate that customers are increasingly happy with your brandand wish to continue using it. Remember, try to recalculate your score at longer intervals where possible, as customer numbers will naturally fluctuate, and measuring too often can affect your data.
Customer lifetime value
Once you’ve worked out how many customers your business retains it’s worth calculating how much value they generate during their time with you.By understanding how much value each customer brings to your company you’ll be able to assess how effective your promotional content is, and whether you need to invest in encouraging repeat customers.
To find your average customer lifetime value simply multiply together the average purchase frequency and average purchase value, and then multiply the result by the average customer lifetime.
Query resolution time
A key aspect of providing a good customer experience is ensuring that all queries and issues are resolved promptly. When customers have to wait several days for a company to respond, they’re much more likely to seek similar products and services elsewhere; therefore, it’s important to keep your query resolution time down.
To check you’re staying on top of your customer assistance targets, calculate your average resolution time by dividing the overall amount of time spent on customer service by the number of issues resolved in that period.If you notice that the resolution time is higher than you’re aiming for, consider investing in staff training, or extending your customer service facilities to cover telephone, email, social media, and self-service options.
Customer effort score
When users struggle to find your contact information, or feel your customer service process is overly complex, they’re unlikely to return as customers. For this reason, if you suspect your customer service facilities may be a sticking point it’s worth checking your customer effort score for guidance.
The best way to do this is to ask your customers to rate their experience once their query has been solved. You can then find the average value by diving the overall sum of your scores by the number of clients who completed the survey.
Aim to reduce your effort score as much as possible, as this directly impacts your client’s loyalty, and therefore your overall sales.
Are you ready for CX success?
Ultimately, your customer experience strategy will be unique to your specific business and product type, so finding the most effective CX metrics for your needs can take some experimentation. Remember, when you’re hoping to promote company growth, delivering an excellent customer experience is vital, so don’t underestimate the benefit of utilising CX metrics to measure your successes, understand current issues, and help create innovative future plans.