In my last blog, I posed the question “Should you be interested in customer engagement?” A great starting point is to review what’s working and not working with your current CX metric.
Sonya McAllister and Leslie Pagel recently challenged some commonly used metrics in a Walker Insight Webcast focused on CX Metrics.
For example:
- Overall Satisfaction is simple, provides a full range of ratings from one survey question, and can allow for competitive benchmarking. However, it sets a lower bar to achieve and improvement efforts may not yield a strong competitive advantage for your organization. This metric is often used for evaluating a recent interaction or when you want to benchmark against external data.
- Net Promoter (NPS®) often resonates with executives as it is simple, popular, and is an easy concept to rally people around. That said, it has more limited application, is less flexible, and is not very actionable by itself. NPS is commonly used with a large customer populations with transactional relationships where revenue comes from referral.
- Loyalty is easily tied to specific customers or customer groups, serves as a leading indicator of business outcomes such as retention and is actionable overall, by account, and by person. Yet, as a more complex concept, it can be more difficult for employees to connect how they directly impact customer loyalty. This metric is often used when long term relationships are important or activities are focused on a specific customer or account.
None of these metrics are perfect. In fact, at Walker we're seeing more companies starting to consider custom KPI metrics in their VoC projects with us. The standard metrics just do not meet all of their needs.
How is your metric doing? It's time to “weigh the pros with the cons” to make sure your metric is right for your organization. If it’s not, I have another idea for you….
Kitty Radcliff
Vice President, Consulting Services
