In today’s digital-first-but-not-digital-only, customer-centric world, customer experience (CX) has quickly emerged as a critical differentiator for 9 out of 10 executives. But while many organizations are taking important steps to deliver on the promise of CX, they’re also challenged with measuring customer experience and tracking the value of CX and how it drives business results.
There are many reasons for this. But from our seat, a key reason is that measuring CX isn’t easy. Top-level metrics like NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) and others may be easy to collect, but they’re hard to move, and harder still for leaders at all levels of an organization to use to make ROI-driven business decisions.
Which is why we believe business executives will more likely invest in CX once they see how improving customer experience can predictably deliver better business results and directly impact customer-centric business improvements.
This is where customer experience analytics and a method for tracking CX – a “CX Metrics System” – comes into play. Properly designed and deployed, it will allow your organization to:
While measuring CX isn’t simple (in today’s complex business world, few critical activities are), it CAN be both straightforward and predictable with the right CX Metrics System in place.
By systematically linking CX to desired and targeted business results such as retention, revenue or cost efficiencies, CX leaders consistently and predictably demonstrate how CX improvements directly impact the bottom line.
When it Comes to Measuring CX, Everything Starts with Data – and a Metrics Framework
Gathering and accessing customer data is the foundation for any CX measurement effort — data that drives an understanding of the customer experience, and that ultimately will drive action to deliver results.
Simplistically, there are two main sources you can leverage:
For today’s multichannel customer you need both VoC and VoA data. To best interpret it, it’s important to set these metrics in the context of a framework which logically links them together, ultimately connecting them to business results.
From the top down, we start with what we can measure, and how it relates to what we are trying to accomplish:
Aligning What You Measure with the Business Results You Wish to Achieve
The depth and granularity with which you develop and apply your CX metrics system and framework has everything to do with your customer experience measurement and related business objectives.
For example, a more comprehensive or strategic CX measurement effort might dictate that you link deeper and wider metrics – across customer segments or lines of business, for example – to incorporate scorecard objectives such as revenue, retention or cost of service.
Or, for a more focused, Agile effort, you might define these same types of measures with a much narrower focus: a specific customer segment, business metric or product/service.
Whichever your approach or objectives, the questions asked by stakeholders are both consistent and predictable.
- How do I activate?
- How do I get value?
- How do I prove ROI on the customer experience-related work we’re doing, or plan to do?
Whichever approach you take, or the business results you choose to measure, you will need to have specific goals to understand the impact of customer behavior on your strategy and objectives.
By adding visibility of success and progress against it as a key element of your approach, you’ll be able to both prove and improve your outcomes, your businesses results and your customer experience.