Customer experience measurement

Measure customer experience with these key CX metrics

It’s critical that a company is investing its time and money to measure customer experience metrics.

Customer experience measurement is the act of defining the relation between the current customer experience rate and business goals. By performing accurate measurements, you can see how effective your efforts and resources are in your path to perfect CX.

There are many ways to measure the effectiveness of your CX effort, but the world’s leading companies are using these three tactics mostly:

• CSAT (Customer satisfaction) – Measuring the rate of customer satisfaction
• CSAT is used in many outsourcing companies. You are reading a CSAT report when you realize there are basic questions such as “How would you rate your experience with our service” where the response options go from “Very satisfied” to “Very dissatisfied.”
• CSAT is suitable for measuring the quality of a service/ transaction to see if customers are happy with your service/ employee/ policy/ etc, how satisfied are they, and what makes them most satisfied. 
• CSAT can be applied at all touchpoints, the customer’s journey phase, or the whole journey. 
• CES (Customer Effort Score) – Measuring the amount of effort it takes customers to accomplish a specific task while interacting with the brand

An example of CES questions

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a single-item metric that measures how much effort a customer has to exert to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, a product purchased/returned or a question answered.

CES is perfect at those touchpoints whose conveniences are the make-or-break factor.

NPS (Net Promoter Score) – Measuring the loyalty of customers 

If you are somehow unfamiliar with the Net Promoter Score, you have nonetheless been touched by it. This metric is reflected by one simple question: “On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend [Company Name] to a friend or colleague?” 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the loyalty of customers to a company. The “loyalty” can also be determined by how willing the customers in to recommend your service/product to other customers. NPS scores are measured with a single-question survey and reported with a number from -100 to +100, a higher score is desirable.

Now used by two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 according to Fortune, NPS is the ideal metric to focus on in the digital and social-oriented world we are living in. Some 40,000 employees use it at IBM, and the executive who oversees its use, Michelle Peluso, says, “It’s more than a metric. One could use the word ‘religion.’”

The NPS creators – Bain & Company has conducted a large experiment with over a hundred companies to see the relevance between customers’ answers to their real actions when interacting with the business afterward. Customers are asked the only question “On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” You can probably ask a second question “Why did you give the answer you gave?”

1.  Customer giving from 0 to 6: They are Detractors – the rejecting customers 
2. Customer giving from 7 to 8: They are Passives – the passive customers
3. Customer giving from 9 to 10: They are Promoters – the supportive customers 

This classification also helps differentiate their buying behaviors, with:

• Detractors: they can leave you for your competitors and can talk bad about you with their social circle 
• Passives: They can be easily distracted, thus leaving you for another business that offer better products or services
• Promoters: They stay longer, buy more and recommend your service to their social circle

Most common mistakes when applying measurement metrics

All metrics and tools can only be effective if we thoroughly understand the core elements of customer relationship management. 

Typically, customer feedback is only measured in aggregate, by segment, or after isolated transactions at individual touchpoints. This approach fails to capture a customer’s unique context and hinders your ability to effectively manage journeys and measure overall experiences.

Moreover, survey fatigue is growing. Fewer and fewer customers respond to your surveys, rendering sample sizes too small and data statistically insignificant.

Only focus on the number, not the implied problems

Companies that only take CSAT, CES or NPS to see how they are doing in comparison to their competitors or reach some internal KPI and stop there won’t go far in their CX journey – the number only won’t help you improve your customer experience solutions.

Lack of clear orientation

If you are performing discarded measurement programs without a clear goal of what to achieve and how you will analyze it, high chances are you are just bothering your customers for nothing. Without a clear and united vision, most measurement tactics can be a good score watcher, nothing more.

Not involving employees – those actually engaging with customers

Not involving those in customer care or lack internal proper training can both lead to disaster – your employee doesn’t understand why they ask that question, how they can best implement those tools while your customer care officers don’t get involved in the question defining process – these can lead to discarding measurement activities and ineffective process. 

Choose the wrong customer personas and the wrong time

When you want to survey customers to make predictions about the companies’ future growth and expansion, asking the wrong audience can lead to ill-informed leaders, and what do ill-informed leaders do? They make bad choices and plans. 

Another thing that can go wrong is when you want to evaluate customer relationships with the brands – choosing new customers in their first buy or customers when they are filing a complaint can also be a bad idea. A lot of companies tend to use one customer experience metric, usually NPS or CSAT, throughout the customer journey. This single metric approach can be really problematic. If the customer has different experiences and different needs at each stage of the customer journey, how prudent is it to employ just one metric at each of these different stages?

To get much more accurate and actionable results, companies should first discover end-to-end customer journeys using customer journey analytics. Do a deep dive and discover micro journeys from within important macro journeys. Once you have understood the different touchpoints and how they impact the overall journey, you would be in a far better position to pick the most appropriate metric to use at each touchpoint.

Too obsessed with ill-impressed customers

I get it, you want all of your customers to be happy, so you put a lot of effort into pacifying disappointed customers – but don’t be too obsessed with customers who are hating on the business, because when you put all your resources and strategies for that, high chances are you are neglecting a large number of customers who are your best promotors.

How ASUS gains success with customer experiences

ASUS is a multinational company known for the world’s best motherboards, PCs, monitors, graphics cards and routers, and driven to become the most-admired innovative leading technology enterprise. With a global workforce that includes more than 5,000 R&D professionals, ASUS leads the industry through cutting-edge design and innovations made to create the most ubiquitous, intelligent, heartfelt and joyful smart life for everyone.

Data and platform integration are paramount in their customer experiences, aiming at creating a 360-degree customer view and forming cohesive brand experiences to attribute to an overall omnichannel experience. ASUS Singapore provided their shopping team with Antsomi 365 CDP’s data to enable Clienteling (the use of customer data by sales staff to create long-term relationships). This application not only makes intimate customer service possible but also efficient for high volumes of shoppers across multiple channels such as previous transactions and wishlists. The O2O relationships also get levitated by connecting online customer accounts to their transactions in brick-and-mortar stores. The true power of this strategy however is in the automation of the process – consumers don’t have to do anything except have their phones on them.

By leveraging data and having full access to the right metrics at all time – real-time to be exact, strategist at ASUS Singapore has success grow by 56% with a 59% in quantity sales year on year. The registering an average order value of over $1,300, proving that the new ease of use encouraged customers to purchase higher-end devices than before.

Wrap up

There are millions of companies are applying NPS, CSAT or CES in their CX journey right now. According to Bain & Company, companies with the highest NPS has a 2.6 times high growth rate than their peers. However, all metrics and tools can only be effective if we thoroughly understand the core elements of customer relationship management. According to experts, companies that use the metric effectively realize that gradually, they are becoming more customer-centric to create more excellent customer experiences.

If you want to know more about customer experiences and the technology to be successful with it, subscribe to SmartOSC’s blog or contact us for more information.