A basic definition of customer experience analytics is: The discovery, collection, and analysis of customer data to help you make informed, intelligence driven decisions.
The data you can get from customer experience analytics allows business owners and leaders to analyse efforts and strategies to see what is working well, and more importantly, what is not. It can also help uncover the challenges customers are currently experiencing which you may not be aware of.
Before you start planning for customer experience improvements, you need the right data and metrics to help you establish goals and initiatives as well as set benchmarks to see what kind of impact these goals and initiatives will have on your customers.
Understanding customer experience analytics gives you the ability to get more personal and intimate with customers, leading to efficient and proactive interactions with them.
Examples of the most common metrics to focus on
- Net Promotor Score (NPS)
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Churn Rate
- Retention Rate
Should you measure all metrics?
The answer is no. You should only measure the ones relevant to your business. Also, you should not ask your customers to give you feedback before you understand what you would do with it.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is the current favourite customer experience metric across most business sectors. NPS is short and simple for the customers to answer and it is very easy to track. NPS consists typically of only two questions and is often used to rate a brand, service, or product in general. Your NPS score should increase over time, in line with a continuous improvement strategy for delivering simply brilliant customer experiences. So, how do you calculate NPS?
- Calculate the percentage of promoters among your surveyed customers.
- Calculate the percentage of detractors.
- Subtract the detractor percentage from the promoter percentage.
In short, why should you use NPS?
- Fast and simple both for customers and companies.
- Open text feedback enables a deep dive to see the bigger picture.
- Industry-standard metric: it is widely understood, and you can benchmark against the competition.
- An increase or decrease in NPS helps you to predict future revenue increase or loss.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
CSAT, together with NPS, is one of the most used customer experience metrics. It has many forms and scales, but the most common is a scale from 1 to 5. CSAT is a very good tool if you want to measure if a customer is satisfied with a one-time interaction.
Why use CSAT?
CSAT is a very simple and efficient customer experience metric to implement. Just as with NPS, it is very simple and fast for the customers to answer. It is often asked from a customer after a sale or customer service enquiry to evaluate the efficiency of the customer service department. CSAT is a great way to see what your customers think about you right now.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score is becoming a more popular customer experience metric that involves customer's input. CES is a pure transactional metric and it typically assesses the simplicity of a single interaction. CES typically answers “how easy did you find our service today?” and has a 5- or 7-point scale system.
CES is different from NPS or CSAT because, in order to make use of it, you need to follow both the average score and the distribution of scores. Analysing distributions can help a business in identifying which of your customers experience effortless service and, more importantly, find those are struggling during the same process. By proactively helping and reaching out to those who are struggling, you can improve their experience.
Why use CES?
CES helps you to analyse the complexity of a service. CES is a transactional metric and should be used after service interactions and other key moments of truth like after purchase. What CES does is that it measures an ability to reduce friction to improve the service.
CES is a good metric for revealing detraction drivers. With NPS and CSAT you most likely get a more balanced view: not only your weaknesses but also your strengths. Using any one of them is useful to understand the customer experience.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. CLV could be calculated both as a business value that customer brings during the whole time of the relationship with a company, or as a value over a defined period of time.
Churn Rate
The customer churn rate reflects how many of your customers have stopped using your products or services. Generally, customer churn rate counts the total number of lost customers or the percentage of lost customers within a defined time period. Sometimes, the customer churn rate is calculated as a lost business value. Following the customer churn rate is critical because generally, it generally costs less to retain existing customers than it will to acquire new customers.
Retention Rate
Customer retention rate is the measurement of how a business retains customers over a specific period of time. The metric is highly connected to the churn rate: the higher the retention is, the lower the churn rate would be. For example, if your churn rate is 25% over a year, that means that 75% of customers stayed with your business. Thus, the retention rate is 75%.
The benefits of customer experience analytics
Customer experience analytics can help businesses and contact centres grow new revenue lines and exceed customer expectations. A customer’s experience is vitally important to growth, but without the data and insights to make informed decisions, it can prove to be very difficult to improve and progress.
Omni-Channel contact centre solution data provides customer service centres with the insight they need to map out customer journeys using real life intelligence instead of assumptions. Insight from the data helps to deliver a holistic, non-siloed view which can help deliver a more consistent and efficient customer experience. The data allows for the discovery of obstacles in the current customer journey, giving businesses the chance to reduce or remove them.
Examples of the outcomes delivered by using the right tools:
- Real-time reporting across multiple channels of business
- Seamless transitions across various methods of contact
- A consistent personalised experience
- Insights into a customer’s journey and behaviour
- Ability to report on historical trends
By considering implementing the right tools and taking time to understand the positive impact on customer relationships – businesses can quickly develop healthy practices that are likely to translate into longer term relationships with customers, it’s an approach that has customer engagement at the heart of business culture.
To understand how Onecom could help your business drive growth, operational agility, and deliver simply brilliant customer experiences through detailed contact centre reporting solutions, chat to us today. We're proud to be supporting businesses throughout the pandemic with several free of charge remote working solutions, as well as working on long-term future success road maps in preparation for a new way of working, in a bespoke virtual 'Art of the Possible' workshop.