When it comes to effective brand building, the buzzword is improving customer experience (CX). Studies have explained how improved CX drives revenue, reduces churn and helps companies enhance customer satisfaction.
While providing continuous and consistently high customer satisfaction is tough enough, companies face a greater challenge of measuring the effectiveness of their CX strategies. It certainly isn’t an easy job when you have a host of metrics.
How then, does a company choose the right metric?
Let’s discuss ways that will help a business decide which of the metrics to choose and how best to measure their performance.
Match the metric with business goals
What works for one company need not be effective for another. It is imperative that the company chooses its metrics carefully and matches it with its business goals. This would mean mapping the customer’s experience at not just the key touch-points but delving deeper and gaining a more macro perspective of the overall journey.
Matching metrics also translates into aligning the CX measurements with the reporting schedule of your organization. For instance, if your company brings out a half-yearly business report, the CX measurements will need to be aligned accordingly. Consequently, the metrics should allow you the flexibility to compare the components in the same time-frame. That way, you ensure that the comparisons are fair and proportionate.
Metrics to quantify the qualitative
Customer interaction happens at various points and the needs and expectation of the customer at every point is different and has to be captured accurately. The best way to get this data would be to use the Net Promoter Score metric to tap into customer opinions and experiences with the product. This qualitative data would need to be made quantifiable so that the insights can be used to remedy the gaps in delivery.
Furthermore, NPS needs to be applied at the right point and carried out for a while. Oftentimes companies overlook the nature of customer interaction and apply the NPS at inappropriate moments. For instance, the consumer might be calling the customer care to ask about the delivery of a product, and the end of the call is asked to rate the company product defeating the purpose of the metric.
Using an equitable scorecard rather than a balanced one
A balanced scorecard won’t work in today’s scenario where customer interactions are driven through multiple channels and have dynamic needs. An equitable scorecard, on the other hand, takes into account various other factors that impact customer experiences like demographics, location, environment, and other factors that cannot be controlled or influenced.
For instance, a store in an overcrowded location might be doing great business but since the customers might experience a longer queue, a level of dissatisfaction might be recorded. A balanced scorecard will record a poor customer experience, automatically reflecting on the store’s performance. But, an equitable scorecard metric will help zero in on the real issue and give a larger picture—that of the financial success of the store—to an organization, which can then focus on fixing the actual issue of managing a larger crowd.
Real-time, predictive and agile
Customers expect purchase journeys to be omnichannel, personalized, secure, seamless across devices, and on-demand. The use of Customer journey analytics makes it easier to track a customer’s journey from end-to-end in real-time. It enables a company to generate a micro-level as well as macro-level reports. Combined with predictive tools, the company is far more empowered to receive actionable insights on customer behaviour. Since technology keeps advancing, the metrics deployed need to adapt, scale-up, and keep up.
Identify and prioritize key segments and journeys
CX measurements should allow the company to identify its most valuable customer segments. Customer journey analytics help companies to identify segments that are most profitable and have a high potential for growth. Focusing on key areas will help companies to divert their revenues to growth-generating areas, fix issues that pertain to a certain segment and improve clarity on business-expansion strategies.
Read more: A Guide to Improving Customer Experience
There’s a need to tie together customer metrics across all the departments and levels for a comprehensive report rather than having each of them work on silo customer data. Every team should have access to a top-level view of a customer’s journey.If you have more questions on the right metrics for your business, do write in to our expert team at Suyati.
