Customer experience is not merely a determinant of customer satisfaction – it is also a crucial differentiator for businesses in an environment where products are losing their USPs like brand and price.
The fifth edition of the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report revealed that 88% of respondents rate customer experience (CX) as important as the product or service offered by a business.
To ensure high-value customer experiences, businesses must standardise customer service and create milestones to evaluate customer feedback and CX.
But first, why measure customer experience?
Business benefits of measuring CX
Measuring customer experience lets you:
- Define customer success standards to be followed by all teams, leading to consistent service quality
- Create benchmark levels to assess - and improve - service teams' performance and productivity
- Uncover competitive intelligence that can boost sales, enhance customer satisfaction
- Easily identify new ways of increasing business efficiency
- Use CX metrics to track the effectiveness of earlier investments and set new goals
Broadly speaking, measuring CX helps you learn what your customers most appreciate about the experience you offer, as well as what needs to be fixed.
How can you measure customer experience effectively?
Here are some ways to measure your CX to increase business efficiency and inch closer to your sales goals.
1 . Monitor customer experience metrics
Metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Efforts Score (CES), Average Resolution Time (ART) etc, are good to start with.
Look out for scores such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), which let you know how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to someone they know. Similarly, Customer Effort Score (CES) can help you get a clear picture of the affinity customers feel towards your business, based on their experience.
Too many numbers? Leveraging a single source of truth, like the Salesforce Customer 360, can help you collate customer satisfaction data from different sources and create custom metrics in seconds.
2 . Collect direct responses from customers
A powerful way to measure your CX is to proactively seek customer feedback with well-designed surveys, questionnaires, and polls. Such feedback will give you insight into their pain points and challenges, using which you can remove bottlenecks in customer interactions across touchpoints and channels.
3. Analyse customer churn
Analysing reasons given by customers who have stopped using your offerings lets you plug leaks in the sales and service delivery processes. By analysing customer churn data – average churn period, channels with maximum churn, purchase categories that see higher than average churn, and more – you can identify areas that need transformation. For example, by using an integrated service CRM, you can ensure your CX data translates into timely actionable intelligence for all teams, right from marketing and sales to customer support and IT.
4. Study trends in support ticket volume
Customer support contributes significantly to the customer experience. To measure your customer experience, you can evaluate support tickets to identify recurring issues, highlight them to respective teams, and smoothen customer journeys .Thus helping increase business efficiency and drive customer delight. For instance, if data from Service Cloud points towards long wait times as a deterrent to the customer experience, you can scale up on self-service formats. This can include a customer portal with clear FAQs and a resource library of explainer videos or tutorials in the customer’s preferred language for an improved CX.
5. Map social media sentiment
Tracking customer sentiment in the social and online universe is a powerful way to strengthen your CX measurement framework. You can measure social media sentiment by monitoring brand mentions on social media and analysing the words used to talk about the company. Analysing positive/negative words, following relevant hashtags, or tracking keywords to keep a tab on your online brand perception are some effective methods. By continually following conversations related to your brand as well as your competitors, you can stay ahead of the curve in forecasting and impacting your CX score.
Leverage Salesforce Service Cloud to create delightful customer experiences cost-effectively
Using Salesforce Service Cloud, businesses can enable faster resolution of issues across any channel and provide connected, personalised experiences. Service Cloud helps you access intelligent, actionable data that can enhance your CX score and also reduce contact centre costs, boost agent productivity and increase efficiency.
The end result? Complete visibility into every customer interaction, standardised customer service and up to 60% reduction in overall cost.
Increase business efficiency and empower your service teams
Click here to explore Salesforce Service Cloud
Read more about creating the perfect customer experience:
Customer experience: a roadmap on how to create the ultimate customer journey
Boost your employee experience to improve your customer experience
How to create a customer-centric experience
Here are some powerful customer experience metrics you should monitor
