Having a dedicated CX strategy is important for any company in a market that prioritizes experience differentiation. While at one time the way for companies to maintain a corporate advantage was product differentiation, things have changed in saturated markets where customer loyalty is harder to gain—and keep. While most businesses recognize the importance of providing remarkable experiences for customers, they may not fully grasp all of the metrics that can help them assess their strategy to deliver a superior customer experience.
Sogolytics is all about collecting feedback to help our clients learn what their customers truly want and provide exceptional CX. That’s why we’ve compiled some of the most useful metrics that we’ve found for improving overall CX strategy and providing greater ROI wins for organizations.
Follow us as we delve deep into the key metrics in this series and demystify quantitative customer experience!
8 Metrics You Can Count On
Your customers are as diverse as the products and services available to them from a multitude of companies. The only way to make sure you’re tapping into the pulse of your customers is through effective customer experience management platform built around powerful analytics to gain a better understanding of what they want. The metrics within that platform should give you a great snapshot of what’s working and what’s not, while also give you a guideline on what actions you can take to improve the overall experiences.
But what metrics are important to know? How do you use them to provide better experiences than ever before? Well, we’re here to help you answer that.
1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) – One of the most recognizable metrics in CX is the CSAT score. And why shouldn’t it be? Knowing how satisfied your customers are with your products, services, or support can really help you home in on how well—or poorly—your company is doing. It can be measured with simple question responses like “very satisfied, neutral, or dissatisfied.” Of course, the simplicity of the answer options hides a much more nuanced scoring method. CSAT not only reveals how good a customer experience was, but can also be used to determine other customer opinions and preferences. Think of using questions like: “how was your experience today?”, “how do you feel about the website design?”, “how satisfied are you with the purchase process today?” These are very different questions for your customers, and each of them can determine possible changes to be made.
Pro Tip: Think about what sort of information you want when designing CSAT questions to gain deeper knowledge from your customers on an array of areas!
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS) – Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a score that many are familiar with, even if they don’t know what it’s called. Typically, it’s associated with a range of sad to smiling emojis on a scale of 1-10, used to determine how likely a customer is to recommend an experience, product, or brand to others in their circle. Knowing where you fall on the NPS scale with your customers can tell you how loyal they are, where your promoters and detractors are, and where you have opportunities to be better (with your neutrals and detractors.) With a good feedback platform, you can ask follow-up questions that will help you find the key drivers that could change your score. Why not ask someone to elaborate on their experiences, or explain what could have made it better, if their score is outside of the promoter range? You may find insights that will help you improve customer experiences and NPS!
Pro Tip: Think beyond the smiles and be sure to have follow-up questions to let your customers tell you why they scored you the way they did.
3. Customer Effort Score (CES) – The CES is a bit different than CSAT and NPS, but is no less important. Here the focus is on process. How hard did your customers have to work to get their issues resolved? To get to through to checkout? To find the information they needed on your website? The CES is an exercise in examining your efficiency through the customer perspective. It can reveal nuanced insights. For example, you might discover that there are too many clicks to reach check out, thereby highlighting a high abandoned cart rate. Customers get asked for a lot of information, and they appreciate when it is used safely and with relevance to their interests. Understanding how much effort your customers put into their interactions with you can help you make a seamless and more engaging process for everyone.
Pro Tip: Don’t ignore CES in favor of other metrics! It can highlight changes that will ultimately save you time, money, and raise your ROI!
4. Customer Churn Rate (CCR) – No one wants to lose customers. It’s anathema to every mission and vision of businesses. Acquiring and retaining customers is always the name of the game. Still, losing customers does happen, and it’s not always a bitter break-up. Understanding how many customers are leaving, and why, can lead to greater understanding of not only products and services, but of the business itself. A high customer churn rate could mean your customers are dissatisfied (and this may in fact correlate with a low CSAT rating). Perhaps it means that you need to target a different market, set better expectations, or that support (or something else in their experience) was bad. Of course, you won’t know what went wrong if you don’t ask them. Checking in to find out why they left can be a great way to sometimes win a customer back or ensure you won’t lose others for the same reason. A high CCR signals something is wrong, and it needs to get fixed—fast.
Pro Tip: Having an automated alert set up when CCR goes too high is a great way to immediately be able to respond to issues.
5. Conversion Rate (CR) – If content is king, conversion is its queen. You could have hundreds of thousands of words penned in ads, sales collateral, blogs, webinars, and more, but what does it all mean if it’s not converting anything? Your message must ring true with your customers, and if that message isn’t reaching them effectively, changes are needed. You need content and information to provide for your customers, for sure. 90% of customers will search online about a company before they will visit or even think of making a purchase from them. So content is absolutely key to attracting them, but that content must be compelling enough to convert your customers. Conversion rate can come from many sources (ads, downloads, page visits to link click, etc.) but it will show how effective your messaging is for your customers.
Pro Tip: Authenticity and experiences matter for customers, so you see your greatest conversions when these ring true in your messaging.
6. Marketing Campaign Effectiveness (MCE) – This one is a bit tricky, but very important to understand and use at all times. MCE deals more with the campaigns you design for your existing customers and potential customers coming in. Marketing is always part of the CX strategy because it is through marketing that most initial customer contacts with your organization’s story and messaging occur. Your MCE is a composite of other metrics within it (like marketing channel numbers, retention rates, sales metrics, click through rate, etc.) that can paint a picture of how well a marketing campaign is doing with your customers and on the operational side. It’s a powerful snapshot metric that can directly affect changes in CX and marketing strategy based on its reports.
Pro Tip: Set up the metrics that will determine your MCE during the marketing strategy phase to make the most of it and include the different departments that will make the campaign a winner!
7. Average Resolution Time (ART) – Average resolution time is directly connected to your support metrics. We never want there to be a problem for our customers, but in the event that there is, we want to resolve it quickly. By knowing how quickly resolution occurs—and through which support channels, like online chat, phone, or email—you can see where your customer service is excelling versus where improvements are needed. Of course, not all problems have to be vastly detrimental to the company. A low ART could be caused by something as simple as a website link that doesn’t work. But no matter the size of the problem, handling them all with efficiency and empathy resonates with customers. ART has great similarities to average handling time (AHT), in that typically lower numbers are better.
Pro Tip: All-star support can be a life-saver to your company. Keep your ART low and your care for your customers high.
8. Direct Traffic (DT) – Direct traffic refers to those who come to your site without having to go through any referral. You often hear it described as the customers that found their way to your site directly by typing in the domain name, or from a bookmark they have of the site. The thing is … direct traffic is odd, and it’s actually more than just that. Many SEO experts will say that more than 50% of direct traffic is coming from other sources. So, there are a couple ways to get direct traffic. It could be something like a QR code, links in email, or other places where it may not have been tagged right to show the exact source. Not to get too complicated here, but knowing about this metric can also be good for your CX strategy. You can get an understanding of where people are coming from, and those sources can also shed some light on campaign effectiveness, search rankings, and more.
Pro Tip: Go deeper into direct traffic to know what it’s telling you in comparison to other traffic metrics if you need to make changes or spread your focus for a greater influx of visits.
Leverage your insights
The metrics you study as part of your CX strategy can give you a wealth of information to make better informed decisions when it comes to your customers, their needs, and their experiences.
The more effectively you monitor them, the more proactive you can be about designing superior experiences. We will delve deeper into each of these metrics through the course of this series, sharing insights, ideas, and benefits to help you achieve greater success in your CX strategies.
