Call Center Management Featured Article
Why It's Important to Measure the Customer Experience
What kind of customer experience does your company offer? Has it improved lately? What factors made it improve? What actions lead to the best customer experience outcomes? Where should you be concentrating your resources when it comes to customer interactions?
If you answered “I don’t know” to any of those questions, it’s time to put a measurement tool in place for the customer experience (CX).
Some Ways to Measure CX
One of the most popular ways to measure the customer experience is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), a scale that measures customer loyalty in a number between -100 and 100. The NPS is calculated based on responses to the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”
Another popular metric is the Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT, which asks customers, “"How satisfied were you with your experience?" and has them choose a ranking, often from 1 to 10.
Why It’s Necessary
As the old saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, so without the ability to wield a yardstick on customer relationships, it’s going to be hard to improve them. “Improving the customer experience” can be a hard goal to sell to executives in the C-suite, as it doesn’t come with a hard number of direct monetary benefits to the company, according to Doing CX Right’s Liliana Petrova in a recent blog post.
“You do not want to do all the work and not get credit for it when it does not directly (or immediately) impact revenues or costs,” she wrote. “You need NPS (or another CX measurement) to evaluate your work. It is important to have a CX measure so you can correlate it and tie it to productivity, to savings, or to another benchmark that is part of your current corporate measurement structure.”
It’s important to get the C-suite to understand that customer experience initiatives will probably not instantly add profits to the bottom line, but that the benefits will unfold over a much longer term.
Include the Entire Organization
Don’t limit your CX program just to the contact center or the help desk. Raising CX scores will require buy-in from all departments, even those that don’t directly interface with customers. This may include marketing and advertising, billing and accounting, operations, quality control, IT and more.
Be Patient
Ensure that your CX program is built to withstand a long-haul journey. It won’t happen overnight, and it won’t be easy. But customers with high CX scores are some of the most loyal, and companies that do CX correctly are among the most successful.
Edited by Maurice Nagle