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Organizational success starts with being able to measure the right customer experience (CX) metrics. Identifying where and how your organization exceeds customer expectations is the key to responding to customers, driving satisfaction, loyalty, retention and business goals.
Yet CX metrics continue to vex some organizations. Limited insights into customer needs or journeys hinders understanding customer behavior. According to CMSWire research, 29% of survey respondents called “limited customer insights” a top digital CX challenge.
Organizations have plenty of metrics options to choose from, from traditional to new. A common-sense blend works for most companies, but without knowing which metrics matter for your business, you’re effectively CX-blind. Competitors will be all too happy to take advantage of your inability to troubleshoot customer issues.
The Classics Still Matter — For Now
Organizations still use established Customer Experience metrics because they deliver results. Metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES) and System Usability Scale (SUS) provide valuable insights into customer behavior. CSAT and NPS are particularly popular metrics. Around half of organizations use them to measure digital CX improvement, according to CMSWire research. For organizations measuring satisfaction in specific customer experience areas, issue resolution effort or overall loyalty, these four metrics will provide insights.
Classic metrics have downsides; they aren’t easily actionable or don’t fully explain customers’ feelings. And these metrics might not be in use for long. In 2021, Gartner predicted that 75% of organizations would abandon NPS as a CX metric by 2025. While leaders felt Net Promoter Score accurately indicated loyalty, others felt NPS scores weren’t entirely actionable.
To address the shortcomings of an NPS survey, customers should be able to give detailed answers beyond a number. Alchemer suggests adding an open text field after a scaled question on NPS surveys, allowing respondents to explain their rating. This easy first step will give you much more valuable information than a number alone. Net Promoter Score alone does not provide insights beyond a range of emotions. Without tying that score to the thematic analysis of open text, you miss its true meaning. Understanding the context behind the score is essential for actionable insights.
The classics still matter as long as you’re progressing toward a future where you blend an approach of scoring mechanisms with the context of open text analysis. This combined approach allows you to understand what you need to do to address groups of customers’ needs.
How Next-Gen Metrics Give Granular Insights
Digital products require specific metrics that reflect the unique usability and user engagement of online platforms. To assess user satisfaction, feature usability and overall digital experience, track App Store Ratings, User Engagement Rates and Time on Site.
Beyond these metrics, there’s customer sentiment — how and why customers feel about a product, service or organization. Real-time insights into public perception and trends come from frequent analysis of customer sentiment. This analysis spans all digital channels, including social media, review platforms and directly in-app. Basic sentiment analysis will give you a quick snapshot of how the customer felt about the interaction (whether positive or negative). The next step then becomes figuring out what influenced customer sentiment and how that impacted your business. This is why open text analysis is so critical. Capturing open text gives your customers the ability to share their voice, in their own words, to tell you what exactly they are feeling. It’s that level of familiarity with the customer that will give you the insights to impact the metrics you care about.
Besides open text fields, next-gen metrics tailored to digital experiences can shed light on customer behavior. Sentiment analysis tools, for example, gauge brand sentiment and identify emerging issues or opportunities for improvement.
Classic CX metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES aren’t going anywhere just yet; their adoption has increased yearly for three years, according to CMSWire research (SUS isn’t surveyed). However, next-gen metrics tailored for digital products or that deliver greater insights into customer behavior provide additional context beyond simple binaries or arbitrary scales. Open text fields give customers the opportunity to tell a business exactly what went right — or wrong. Time on Site tells you how engaged customers are with your site and whether they’re finding what they need. App Store Ratings also frequently come with customer comments. When used together, these metrics give a complete picture of the customer journey, allowing your organization to better react to changing customer behavior.
Track Better Metrics Now For Concrete Insights
There are two types of monitoring that help identify changes in customer satisfaction. The first type involves tracking the evolution of customer feelings over time. The second type focuses on monitoring the actions you implement to change those feelings. Together these approaches allow you to address issues early and effectively. If organizations take proactive measures to monitor both lagging and leading indicators, they can prevent small issues from becoming large ones, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
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Monitoring the Customer Experience metrics that prove the most useful for your business allows your organization to make better, informed decisions. With data-backed insights into customer behavior, your organization can prioritize positive customer experiences, from product development to customer service enhancements. Next-gen CX metrics provide more nuanced details about what truly matters to your customers.
Finally, customer experience metrics provide insight into customers’ feelings and challenges during their journey. By understanding customer frustrations and drop-off points, your organization can take specific steps to retain customers until the sale (and beyond).
Now is the time to review your metrics and decide if they’re serving your business. Can you see where customers are dropping out of the journey? Do you have insight into how customers feel about your brand? If not, then it’s time for new metrics and tools to gather and interpret them.
What’s Next For CX Metrics?
The general excitement around AI is also impacting CX metrics. Leveraging AI-powered sentiment analysis and predictive analytics allows businesses to extract actionable insights from large data volumes in real-time, enhancing decision-making. Sentiment analysis captures current customer opinions, while predictive analysis analyzes historical data and behavior patterns to identify future trends. AI analysis can also parse data at scale, allowing organizations to sift through vast amounts of data that manual processes can’t handle.
Understanding and responding to customer behavior will require a wealth of metrics. By leveraging traditional metrics, new metrics and AI-powered analysis, organizations can boost customer satisfaction, increase loyalty and improve the customer journey for all.
Learn about the feedback platform purpose-built for CX and feedback programs: alchemer.com.
