How do you measure your client’s experience?
How can you tell whether your customer experience is exceptional or disastrous? At company level, measurements focus on assessing quantitative indicators, particularly financial ones.
Whether you are a start-up or a multinational business, measuring customer experience is paramount if you want loyal customers and a long-term business strategy.
When you measure customer experience, you will be able to:
1. Know with certainty what customers think about the services you offer
2. understand what makes customers happy or unhappy.
3. Identify clear actions to improve the customer experience within your company.
4. Link the quality of the customer experience to financial indicators, including profit.
What you can measure, you can control!
You can measure the experience using a survey, a chatbot on your website or an employee asking the customer. The core indicators are the Net Promoter Score, the Customer Satisfaction Indicator and the Customer Effort Indicator. I will explain each one next.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is the most popular indicator for evaluating customer experience. It’s also the simplest. The NPS is measured by asking the question: “How willing are you to recommend the brand/company/product/service X family and friends?”. On a scale of 0 to 10, clients grant a note in accordance with the experience they had. Respondents are groups of sin promoters (awarded notes 9 or 10), passive (awarded notes 7 or 8) or detractors (they gave notes between 0 and 6). The NPS value is calculated as the percentage difference between promoters and detractors. The higher the NPS value, the more experience has been appreciated. If the NPS has a negative value, then most customers are detractors, and the services offered by that brand require urgent improvement.
What can we learn from NPS?
If a customer recommends your brand, company, product or service to their acquaintances, it is highly likely that they will buy from you again. However, it is not enough just to find out what the NPS is.
Based on NPS analysis, you can take concrete action:
- Thank the promoters and encourage them to make their next purchase, or even ask them for recommendations of future customers.
- Passives can easily be convinced to become promoters of your company; you just need to pay attention to them and identify what would make them raving fans.
- Detractors are the most important in this metric and deserve the most attention. They can help you understand what dissatisfies them and how you can avoid further complaints. Simply calling detractors and listening to them can work wonders
Customer Satisfaction Indicator (CSAT)
CSAT is a useful indicator because it is based on an immediate reaction of the users of a product or service.
In fact, a lot of companies aim at getting CSAT scores within 30 minutes after customers have used a product or service. CSAT is measured by a survey, usually automated, requiring clients to evaluate an experience by giving a note or rating on a scale of 1 to 5, respectively from “very satisfied” to “not satisfied”.
CSAT shows how the customer feels after interacting with the company, whether that’s purchasing a product, visiting a physical or online store, interacting with a salesperson, receiving a delivery from a courier partner, or contacting the call centre. First and foremost, satisfaction is the fulfilment of the needs that brought the customer to you, regardless of price.
Customer effort Score (CES)
Customer effort score determines the effort required for the client in interacting with a brand/product/service.
This interaction could be a simple one, such as searching for a product or a more difficult one, such as solving a technical problem. The effort is measured by evaluating the answer to the question: “How much effort have you made to solve this problem?”, and answers can vary from “very small effort” to “very high effort”.
CES is a good indicator to measure whether the company’s efforts to reduce the time of serving or solving the customer’s problems are paying off or not. Clients appreciate their time, the speed of the service is more appreciated than the job itself. A study done in 2018 by UP! Our Service Romania shows that 46% of respondents say they are willing to pay more than 10% for superior quality services.
The customer’s feed-back request is more valuable when it is able to convey why they gave a certain note. Open questions help the company identify the interaction points (touchpoints) that require improvement.
Your client has limited time. And wants to spend as little as possible, giving you feedback.
The short and easy measurement process is a goal for most teams dealing with CX. But equally important is to get to customers at the most optimal time through the most preferred channels of it.