5 Metrics To Shape Your Customer Experience – Varun Parthasarathy
Businesses across the world are overhauling existing hierarchies and power structures. New C-suite positions are being created to cater to specific business strategies. Among the most prominent C-suite positions is that of the Chief Customer Officer (CCO). Globally, more than 5000 organizations have a Chief Customer Experience officer, working directly with the CEO.
The CCO is entrusted with the responsibility of improving the quality of customer experience, and to inculcate a culture of customer obsession across the company. Therefore, measuring customer experience through the right channels, at the right time is of great importance to a CCO and the business. This blog gives you a quick sanity check on what to look at to measure customer experience in your company.
Importance of Measuring Customer Experience Right
When the quality of customer experience is measured with the right metrics, it helps the business establish the outcomes of previous investments that were made to improve customer experience. It also helps the business ascertain where they are heading with respect to their customer experience strategy and what improvements need to be made going forward.
Measuring Customer experience in the form of quantifiable metrics helps obtain unambiguous takeaways that can aid in informed decision making. As the Peter Drucker quote goes, “What gets measured, gets managed”.
5 Common Metrics and their value
Most organizations use a standard set of metrics to evaluate the customer experience. The number and types of metrics may vary from company to company, each aligned with the company’s customer experience strategy. On average, businesses use 2.5 metrics to measure the quality of their customer experience
Some of the most common metrics used to gauge the quality of customer experience are:
#1. Net Promoter Score:
Net promoter score (NPS) is a measure of how likely a business is to be recommended by its customers. It is usually measured as part of a survey where customers are asked to rate the brand, product or the service in general, on a scale of 0 to 10.
NPS is an absolute number which is arrived at by subtracting the percentage of the detractors from the percentage of the promoters. While the NPS is a good indicator to inform a business of how popular they are with their customers for their service, it needs to be measured at the right place and time.
#2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT):
CSAT is used to measure the quality of customer service provided. It is a very simple survey of a few questions where the customer rates the quality of the service received. Typically, the CSAT is calculated immediately after the service is provided.
#3. Customer Effort Score (CES):
Customer Effort score is used to evaluate the effort that a customer had to put in to get their request resolved or a need satisfied. The score is usually calculated through the customer’s response to a question on how much effort they had to put in, with options ranging from ‘Very low effort’ to ‘Very high effort’.
#4. First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR):
This metric is used to measure the ability of the company to provide an immediate and final solution at the first interaction session with the customer. A high FCR means that customers typically don’t need to follow-up multiple times, spread over days, to get a solution.
FCR ideally needs to make allowances for issues that cannot be solved in the first contact. The Net FCR is calculated by taking such cases into account.
Net FCR = Number of cases that can be resolved at the first contact / (Total number of cases – Number of cases that cannot be resolved at the first contact).
#5. First Response Rate (FRR):
First response rate is the average amount of time taken by the support team to provide a resolution to a customer’s query. In other words, this metric measures the average time spent by the customer across channels to obtain the final solution from the point of contacting the company to getting the final solution to their issue or query.
In addition, businesses sometimes develop their own metrics which are tailored to suit their needs. Prudent decision making to determine the right metric is of paramount importance. Equally important is to measure the metrics at the right place and right time, while constantly monitoring the performance of the business across these metrics.
A business can then ensure a positive customer experience for its customers in an ever-changing world. The rules are changing, and customers expect businesses to cater to a multitude of needs. Being present across channels is the least that is expected from businesses. Providing a uniform and customer-oriented offering across these channels is a must.
Join us to discuss this and a lot more in our webinar on the new rules of customer engagement featuring industry experts Adrian Swinscoe, Angelica Reyes Froment and Kevin Knight. Register here for the webinar.
