Customer Experience Metrics measure the state of your customer’s happiness with your company, which could indicate if they will buy more, and respond well to and advocate for your brand.
Metrics are critical to gauging the performance and productivity of your Customer-Facing Team. Certain metrics help you understand how your customers are affected by the knowledge and skill of your Team, as well as the effectiveness of your processes and policies. If you are not measuring their impact, you will not know how successful you have been, or where and how you need to improve. To measure and improve, there must be a method to quantify. Not measuring this extremely critical part of your business will cause the customer experience to happen by default – that is not good.
An effective measurement system will help answer such questions as:
- What level of service is our support team delivering?
- How well does our brand and or product resonate with our customers?
- Are our customers happy with us?
- Is it easy for our customers to connect and engage with us?
The metric choice is a pivotal decision in the customer experience strategy. The aim should be to connect and understand cause and effect – what is happening and why.
Here are a few methods to consider:
Performance Measurements:
These are the summations of the employee or organization’s productivity. While not explicitly used to measure the customer experience, this a valid indicator of what goes into the customer’s interaction with your organization. Where employees are concerned, performance measures create a link between their own behavior and the organization’s goals. In the case of organizations, performance measurement is the connection between decisions and organizational goals. An efficient feedback system is important to ensure improvement. Feedback is the method to have the outcomes of work communicated to the employee, work group, or company – what gets measured gets managed.
How to measure it:
Qualitative Measurement – insights from peers, managers, customers, and clients.
- 1:1s – Discussions between supervisors and employees where supervisors provide feedback.
- ·360 reviews – Typically input from peers, team members, or other managers.
Quantitative measurements – numbers or scores based on established quotas.
- Sales – quotas and requirements and how well employees meet them
- Production – number of orders placed or delivery of products, also a quota to meet.
- Error rates – expresses the number of errors as a percentage of the total orders. (Service order errors can prevent prompt delivery of services or products).
Other methods to measure performance include a contribution to company goals and professional development. Teams and organizations typically decide at the beginning of the year which performance metrics are most important and should be measured.
Customer Satisfaction Measurements:
These are the summations of how well your customers are managed. They help to figure out the customer’s satisfaction with a product, service, or interaction by rating strategic points like product performance, shopping experience, website navigation and brand perception.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) – Considered the gold standard customer experience metric. NPS score is obtained using a single-question survey and reported with a number from 0-100, a higher score is desirable. Customers are bucketed into promoters (score of 9 or 10), passive (score of 8 or 9), and detractors (score of 0-6). This score helps gain a more exact picture of loyalty.
How to measure it:
Calculate the Percentage of Detractors minus the Percentage of Promoters. The result is your NPS Score. A score close to one hundred is the goal, and your score can change over time so recheck it at regular intervals.
Customer Effort Score (CES) – Helps figure out the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes and systems in place for a customer to:
- Make a purchase
- Submit an inquiry/resolve an issue
- Return a product
- Make a payment
Typically, a customer will be more loyal to brands that are easier to do business with. Focusing on this score will improve the customer experience and customer satisfaction scores.
How to measure it:
Use surveys – ask questions that can be answered with numerical information. Then calculate the scores to get an average.
These scores can be combined with other metrics to give you a full picture of the customer experience.
Average Handling Time – measures the amount of time a representative spends working on an issue, ticket, or call. A shorter time indicates greater efficiency. However, it is important not to focus on this operational metric too much – we do not want agents to rush through customer interactions without delivering the level of service that meets our goals.
How to measure it:
Implement a time-tracking system where agents manually or automatically track their time per ticket and review the average time over a given period. You can compare current data to that of the earlier period to see improvements or declines.
As you discover times when representatives are caught up on longer calls, explore those issues – these could be opportunities to improve processes or systems, or even supply added training for the representatives.
There are other metrics that will help you find the level of service you deliver, such as Customer Retention and Customer Churn. Also, consider those metrics which measure specifically the satisfaction of your customers, and how happy and engaged your employees may be.
Strategic HR Consultants has the skill and ability to help you review your goals and implement metrics to measure what you want to manage. We work with clients to improve the customer experience, build high-performing customer-facing teams, and increase customer satisfaction to drive loyalty!
