“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”- H. James Harrington.
Measuring KPIs is critical in almost every aspect of a business to determine what is and isn’t functioning. Initiatives come and go based on their ability to meet or exceed expectations. Customer experience efforts, on the other hand, appear to elude measurement at times. It’s not without reason.
Customer feedback and satisfaction are extremely qualitative, but sales and finance numbers are generally cut-and-dry. Nonetheless, if your organization wants to improve its customer experience, first, the customer experience KPIs must be designated and tracked.
How can one expect to improve customer experience if you don’t monitor it?
What Is Customer Experience Monitoring?
CX monitoring is a part of the overall Customer Experience Management. It is the simple act of gathering customer feedback from sources such as social media, consumer forums, eCommerce reviews, and surveys to analyze and find meaning in customer conversations.
Monitoring customer experience is all about tracking the actual behaviors of your real-life consumers. Additionally, it captures the happiness or difficulties that people express in their online conversations.
Why You Should Monitor Customer Experience?
In the present generation, information is democratized to a great extent. Customers have become a very powerful entity that decides the presence of a brand, its relevance, and obsolescence.
Customers have somewhat taken on the role of brand enhancers as well as brand executioners.
It is simply no longer adequate for enterprises selling products and services on the digital highway to provide a consistent experience across numerous channels.
When providing a seamless customer experience becomes a necessity, businesses must take bold steps to make their consumers’ lives more enjoyable, delightful, and, most importantly, memorable.
The expectations of modern consumers quickly change, and the internet and social media make the customer experience much more vocal than just face-to-face communication. Therefore, companies need to monitor different online conversations and know whether or not customers are satisfied.
Monitor your customer experience at every stage of the sales funnel to have a clear understanding of what they enjoy and what needs to be improved.
Companies can connect with their customers in different ways, making sure that all channels are equally effective. At the same time, the variety of communication channels also enables businesses to get more insights into their customers’ preferences, expectations, behavior, and needs.
Some companies don’t understand why they should care about customer experience in the first place. Others collect data related to customer experience without actually analyzing the findings and using the data insights to improve it.
If a brand manages to close the gap between customers’ expectations and their experiences, customers are satisfied. Therefore, if a business wants to keep its customers satisfied, it should break down the overall customer experience into smaller components.
Focus on each of the aspects that have an impact on the customers’ satisfaction. Besides, it’s important to monitor customers’ expectations, adjust the company’s offers, and communicate the consumers’ wants and needs.
Customer Retention and Customer Loyalty
First of all, customer experience is the most important factor that influences customer loyalty. Customer retention and customer loyalty are crucial for businesses’ long-term success, and you can boost customer loyalty by offering a better experience.
Consumers are willing to spend more if you offer a great customer experience. They certainly are more likely to come back to you if their experience with you is better than that with your competitors.
Cross-Departmental Strategy
Monitoring customer experience is also important because it involves multiple departments. Make ‘delivering an outstanding customer experience‘ your main priority. Then you develop a cross-departmental strategy that will align different areas of your business development with your customer experience goals.
Such an approach enables you to improve your performance in all of these areas at once – making your business more unified.
“Remember that from the customer perspective, experiences are seamless, and there is an expectation of consistency across channels – but different internal owners of parts of that experience can cause inconsistency. You must take a longitudinal view of the total experience to spot the inconsistency.” Alan Pennington, Freelance CX, and EX Special Advisor, Author.
5 Key Customer Experience Monitoring Metrics That Brands Should Track
1. Churn rate
The churn rate reflects the number of customers that you lose during a certain period. This is a very important metric that shows how satisfied your customers are and illustrates the effectiveness of your customer service efforts.
To calculate the churn rate, divide the number of lost customers by the total number of customers at the beginning of a certain period.
2. Retention rate
Retention rate also is directly related to customer experience because if customers are fully satisfied with their experience, they return and become loyal customers.
Retention rate is expressed as a percentage of customers who continue to use your products or services within a certain period. Different industries demonstrate different average retention rates.
3. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
This is one of the most used customer experience metrics. Usually, this parameter is measured on a scale from 1 to 5. Customer satisfaction can help you successfully measure customers’ experiences from a single interaction.
For example, this metric will help you evaluate the quality of customer support service.
4. Net promoter score (NPS)
Here, you ask your customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to their friends and colleagues. Customers who rated such a probability on a scale from 1 to 10 should also explain why they gave such a score.
Thanks to feedback from customers, you can see a bigger picture. NPS is a metric for measuring word-of-mouth strategies, and changes in this parameter can help you predict the dynamics of your revenue.
5. Customer effort score (CES)
This is a transactional metric that enables you to see how much effort customers need to put into achieving their specific objectives. For example, you can ask your customers how easy it was for them to solve their problems to evaluate the quality of customer support.
This metric can also help you detect roadblocks that might stop customers from making a purchase. You can also quickly identify customers who struggle and provide the necessary help, decreasing your churn rate.
Why Are Customer Experience Issues Hard to Monitor?
Measuring your customers’ feelings is extremely difficult, especially given that you may not know everything about their experiences.
-
The battery gets heated quickly.
-
The hotel room did not have a working air conditioner
-
The product received was not as per the product specifications
-
The airports did not have hand sanitizers refilled on time
-
The washing machines made a loud sound while spinning
These customer reviews are very specific, with positive and negative sentiments hidden in their conversations. This makes it hard to identify the CX issues.
The easiest and most effective way to identify customer issues is by listening to them!!
It can be done either by asking them questions, feedback and to fill out forms. Off late, due to the internet boom, there is a huge amount of customer conversations that give enough insight into how that customer is feeling about a product or a service.
How to Use Artificial Intelligence for Monitoring Customer Experience?
AI can be very useful for tracking customer experience because it enables you to get actionable consumer insights from lots of unstructured data. Therefore, you can mine data from calls, text messages, videos, and images instead of relying on surveys only. AI not just can analyze feedback from customers but also detect emotional patterns in real-time.
Besides, it can complement the customer surveys by analyzing your customers’ previous answers and predicting how they would answer other questions.
Companies can also use insights from data to identify decreasing sales and reduce costs associated with churn. AI-driven analytics can also help businesses determine the underlying factors that cause frustration among customers.
Thanks to AI and machine learning, the whole data analysis process can be automated, and companies can improve their processes as soon as possible.
5 Important Benefits of CX Monitoring Tools for Your Business
1. Real-Time Reports
A customer experience monitoring tool centralizes all of your customers’ information, allowing you to exchange real-time reports with your multiple departments.
2. Eliminates Guesswork
AI-powered CX monitoring tools can help you eliminate a lot of guessing when figuring out what your customers want. You can anticipate your potential customers’ needs by analyzing their purchase history and online behavior.
3. Interactive Dashboard
Customer feedback and CX data are often shown on dashboards by a customer experience management system. Whether it’s your NPS score or a real-time snapshot of the major patterns in customer feedback, they give a single perspective of what’s going on.
4. 360 degree View
CX monitoring tools convert aggregated customer data into personalized insights about specific consumers. It collects behavioral, transactional, and preference data from customers to create customer profiles that serve as the foundation for meaningful engagement.
5. Inter-Departmental Collaboration
CX monitoring tools enable collaboration across the organization by distributing different pieces of the obtained data among employees so that specific teams can react to it within their scope of expertise and contribute to a better customer journey.
Wrapping Up
“You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know and understand what the current state of the customer experience is, how can you possibly design the desired future state?” Annette Franz, internationally recognized CX leader.
Customers become more and more sophisticated and empowered, and the importance of their satisfaction for your success grows. Fortunately, businesses can use various AI-powered CX analytics tools to get actionable data. You will be able to understand your customers’ emotions and expectations.
Author Bio
Melissa Mauro is a freelance writer who creates quality and original content. She is working for the companies, Best Writers Online and Online Writers Rating writing services review. She believes that creativity and improvement are things, which distinguish a good writer.