HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE METRICS

Let's start with "WHY", like Simon Sinek recommends. (1)

Why do organizations need to measure "customer experience"?

THERE IS NO MOTION WITHOUT EMOTION

The human brain decision mechanism operates with experiences. This learning organism tends to collect experiences, transform them into memories and collect in the lymbic system. The lymbic system is the storage of memories and emotions. The emotions are the major trigger of our actions.

This significantly proves why experiences matter this much in customer behavior.

There are good experiences… There are bad experiences… in the journeys of consumers regarding a brand.

So the question is; among all these experiences;

What makes a “LOVE BRAND”?

Not every experience affects the same. To get much more accurate and actionable results, companies should first discover end-to-end customer journeys using customer journey analytics.

A journey oriented customer experience seems to be essential in prioritization of fixing the frictions. This strategy will also reveal out your company strategy as well. Customer journey analytics, enables to design cross-channel journeys and determine the pain points, and prioritize initiatives based on potential financial impact. 

The next smart thing to do would be to define your differentiating claims of the selected journeys. Do you bet on to be the fastest? The cheapest? The easiest? This claim would lead you to what measure and how to track.

Let’s assume that you have prioritized your journeys and defined your initial claims. Just like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the first stage of the CX pyramid covers the basics: how effective is a company in meeting their customer’s needs? (2)

1.    From the basics: “Does my CX meet my customer’s needs?”

2.    To more advanced questions like: “Is my CX easy to use and navigate?”

3.    Then, a more mature phase: “Is my CX enjoyable for my customers?”

The CX Pyramid measures customer loyalty in logical order from the baseline essentials to more sophisticated business metrics.

Choosing the right metric matters to the extent that the metric must be meaningful to the specific customer touchpoint you’re wanting to analyze.

Customers have feedback fatigue from being asked for their opinion by every company at every interaction. So, you want to ensure that you reach out to measure customer experience at the most important moments, also known as ‘moments of truth’. If you are not tracking the entire customer journey, you will likely fail to measure important interactions and thus miss the step that is failing and needs improvement.

In a recent CX survey, only 21% of respondents are very or extremely satisfied with their ability to quantify the impact of CX on business metrics. (3)

The truth is that there isn’t one metric that is better than another. All three add value to your CX program, you just need to use them strategically. 

1. Net Promoter Score? (NPS)

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. An easy way to define NPS is to think of it as a growth indicator. After all, it’s a customer satisfaction metric that helps you find out:

·      How satisfied consumers are with your products/services;

·      How loyal they are to your brand;

·      How likely customers are to recommend your company to others.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT stands for Customer Satisfaction Score (not very intuitive, we know), and it – like the name implies – is a CX metric that directly measures customer satisfaction levels.

CSAT surveys are ideally sent when you want to see how happy clients are with an action your business took, or certain aspects of your products/services.

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES stands for Customer Effort Score. A good CES definition outlines it as a metric that’s used to measure customer satisfaction levels by focusing on the efforts customers make to interact with your business’ services and products.

The idea is for the survey to help you find out if customers have a hard time performing certain actions when interacting with your brand, and take the necessary actions according to the survey data to streamline processes.

NPS still stands as the most advantageous metric.

BEYOND NPS

Before to decide what to measure, you should have a crystal clear strategy and a mechanism to collect feedbacks from your customers.

There are two types of customer data that you should collect: structured data and unstructured data.

Structured data is the information that does not have a predefined data model or is not organized in a predefined manner. In other words, structured data is quantifiable (demographics, ratings on a scale of 1 to 5, or true/false responses, customer transactions, footprints on the touchpoints) while unstructured data is qualitative (call center calls, open-ended survey comments, or social media posts).

Structured and unstructured data may provide opposing views, and digging deeper into the reasons why can open new opportunities. Whether examining customer satisfaction scores or sentiment feedback, thoughtful data-driven analysis is the key. 

Therefore, it is not difficult to say that the optimum analysis would be mine both data types together and change approaching angle, depending on the journey. For exampla, customer complaints appear to be one of the basic indicators of CX but not sufficient enough to reveal the clear diagnosis.

For every complaint you receive from a customer, there are approximately 26 other people who are unhappy with your company, but choose to say nothing. Those are clients you will most likely lose if you don’t take proper action. (4) Complaints have an indirect impact on NPS, that should strictly be considered.

Something to keep in my mind is, to be able to understand customer feedback sentiment and the impact of your customer feedback on your NPS, including the bottom line like revenue and customer value, is crucial. By not just collecting, but also analysing feedback, you get access to the real customer insights.

BEYOND TRADITIONAL METRICS

In recent years, market research techniques that were once considered unconventional have become routine, and even necessary for companies looking to enjoy results. Take, for instance, the fact that 33% of researchers now conduct less market research face-to-face than they did a mere three years ago. (5)

This is just one piece of evidence that points towards an innovation in market research techniques is now necessary, not optional. The reason behind is that brands are aware of it is not possible to understand consumer behavior solely depending on a Q&A based methods.

Plenty of new methods are being tested to understand and improve CX, moreover customer labs are being launched in order to combine traditional methods together with innovative researches such as;

·      Neuroresearches

·      VR tests

·      Gamification and surveys

·      IoT and geolocation

·      Online collaboration tools

·      Video content analysis

·      Social media mining and content analysis

Let's wrap up;

1-   Choose a journey based approach and prioritize

2-   Gather data and feedback from all types of interactions, from maximum number of customers and many toucpoints

3-   Combine your structured and unstructured data with drivers of loyalty, revenue and behavioral metrics.

4-   Next big thing! Once this mechanism will start to operate properly, these 3 steps will lead to use predictive analytics to bypass traditional CX measurements. In other words, you will have a full fledge understanding of your customers even without running researches.

Sources:

1-   Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, by Simon Sinek

2-   https://usabilla.com/blog/measure-cx-performance-looking-beyond-the-nps-score/

3-   2020 State of Customer Journey Management and CX Measurement Report

4-   https://www.retently.com/blog/customer-satisfaction-metrics/

5- https://takenote.co/innovative-market-research-techniques/

Emel ?uhac?

Customer Experience Director, Yap? Kredi

Neuroscience in Marketing and Finance Expert