The customer experience is the key to make or break any company out there. If you want to provide the best customer experiences possible, you need to start by measuring these experiences using a variety of metrics. Provided below are some metrics that you can use to turn customer experiences into easily readable data and statistics. This will make it a lot easier for you to take action based on the data available.
#1 Net Promoter Score
This basically involves asking your customers whether or not they would recommend your services to other people. If customers have had a bad experience they are likely to give you a low score, but high scores will indicate that their experience was something that you don’t need to change in order to make it any better. A help desk ticketing system such as the one offered by Kayako can help your customers ask whether or not they would recommend your services to anyone else. This metric gives you an angle that you might not get with more straightforward metrics.
#2 Customer Satisfaction
This is perhaps one of the most intuitive metrics by which you can gauge the success of any interaction with a customer. Much like the NPS, customer satisfaction or CSAT as it is often referred to can be measured on a scale of one to ten. You simply need to ask your customers to give you a rating based on their experience. You should definitely ask for a reason for the score as well, especially if the score is low. This is because of the fact that raw data can’t help as much as qualitative reviews that customers might leave for you.
#3 Competitor Performance
This is data that you are not going to get from your customers, although a low NPS might lead you to look into this metric a bit more seriously. This data basically includes competitor prices as well as their NPS and CSAT scores if you are able to get your hands on them. Basically you need to have data on how your competitors are approaching their business. This makes CSAT and NPS scores a bit easier to understand because it gives them at least some level of context. This is important if you want to be able to actually use that data.
#4 First Response Time
This is a very useful piece of data, especially when you consider the fact that you don’t need customer opinions to get it. The first response time is one of the most important metrics there is because of the fact that it gives you actionable data that can’t be marred by subjectivity in any way. Once you get your FRT data, you can make a decision about whether or not it needs to be reduced. That being said, an inversely proportional relationship between FRT and CSAT or NPR means that customers are not getting as much time as they feel they need.
#5 Customer Effort Score
While it is true that you need to optimize your customer service as much as possible, another thing that needs to be realized is the fact that sometimes customers might not be putting effort in on their part to get the kind of customer service that they might feel is deserved. This data can be obtained by ascertaining the number of customer service platforms that your customers accessed. If this data shows that customers did not put effort in on their own, chances are that the low CSAT or NPR score that they gave can be ignored.
#6 Task Completion
Ideally, every single task that is assigned should be completed. Completion rate is one important metric that you can look into, but another important aspect of it is the amount of time it took to complete a specific task. If tasks are taking too long to complete, this can indicate a potential flaw in the system that might make it difficult for customers to get their queries responded to in a reasonable amount of time. This is highly important and highly actionable data that you should immediately start collecting if you want to improve your customer experience as much as possible.
#7 Customer Suggestions
If a customer gives you a low score, one of the next steps that you should take is to ask them how you can make sure that the experiences they receive are worthwhile in the future. Most of the time customers will give you clear cut instructions on how you can serve them better. Customer effort comes into play here as well. Customers with low effort scores might not provide good suggestions so their data can be ignored so that you can focus on the most actionable data available to you at the time.