Getting the most out of your customer experience measures
Customer experience KPI’s are a great way of tracking how well you are meeting customer expectations, but they are too often used just to tick a box. If you aren’t acting upon your findings, and effectively using them to inform strategy and drive business performance, you won’t be reaping the potential benefits.
Which KPI should you be using?
With certain KPI’s being more suited to certain types of CX programme, you need to determine which measure is most suitable for your business:
1. NPS
NPS is boardroom friendly, holistic and links strongly to loyalty. However, “how likely are you to recommend our brand/product/service” isn’t always the right question. Recommendation encompasses more than just customer experience, not everyone tends to recommend things to friends/family, and there are many things that people are unlikely to ever recommend even if they’ve had a positive experience. We recently delved into these cons of NPS and how you can maximise its effectiveness, and how you can improve your score while keeping customers at the centre of your business.
2. Customer Satisfaction Score (C-Sat) or Index (CSI)
Satisfaction is a universally understood and comprehensive measure. Embedding it into your business comes with a whole realm of benefits, from providing a real understanding of what drives stakeholder perception, to knowledge of where to focus efforts to improve customer satisfaction. However, like any other of these measures, C-Sat or CSI are not sufficient as solitary scores; they don’t always mean growth, nor do they predict behaviour.
3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
The customer effort score is gaining momentum as ease of use becomes increasingly important across different industries. If a customer has to exert a lot of effort to do business with you, it is unlikely they will do so again. A focus on this measure helps businesses focus on pain points and improving your score is likely to have direct effects on customer retention. However, the measure is limited in that it is very focused and neglects wider aspects of the brand experience.
When choosing between these measures, as well as taking into considerations their individual drawbacks and the measures you need to take to ensure effective use, it is also important to pick one and stick with it. Consistent measurement of the same KPI will allow you to spot patterns in your customer experience and set targets for improvement.
How to effectively use your KPI’s
Too much focus on benchmarking and comparing KPI’s with other businesses is of limited value. It neglects to focus on how you can work towards meeting your customers’ expectations and distracts from what really matters to your customers: having a positive experience.
So, once you’ve chosen a KPI, the next two steps are vital:
1. Act and improve
Uncover what impacts your score and where you should be focusing your efforts. Do this through additional product or service questions or by linking your KPI’s to verbatim feedback. Once you know where you should prioritise your improvements, you should create an action plan and identify who is responsible for implementing what. A customer service charter is one example of how you can ensure everyone in your business knows what is expected of them in your organisations’ journey towards customer-centricity.
2. Gauge return on investment
When implementing actions to improve your customer experience KPI’s, take time to assess the value your organisation has gained. If you are improving the experience for your customers, you should be seeing increases in loyalty and detractors changing into customers who feel part of and engaged with your brand. Such customers should provide value to your business through cross selling and positive word of mouth. By making this link between your action plan and your customer value and profits, you will see how running an effective CX programme can make money for your business.
The bottom line
It’s all well and good measuring a KPI, but it’s what you do with it that counts. Recording the scores alone will not improve them! It is only when you act upon findings from CX programmes or take the time to measure your return on investment that you will see the benefits on your customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention and ultimately, profits.