Delivering a successful customer experience helps businesses improve customer satisfaction, boost revenue, and achieve competitive advantage. For those working in customer experience management (CEM), the word “insights” holds a huge significance. While implementing a customer experience strategy, many businesses end up struggling with vague data that doesn’t define an attainable goal. The lack of actionable CX insights makes it difficult for them to drive meaningful change.
According to Forrester, being data-driven is no longer enough to become a customer-centric business. It’s the insights (about customers, partners, processes, and operations) that drive your businesses forward. So, what are the customer experience (cx) insights critical to your business? Let’s take a look:
Journey Insights
Every CX leader is concerned about the customer journey yet most of them fail to add it to their CX programs. While brainstorming touchpoints and designing a visual of the customer journey (based on their experience with your company) is good, incorporating that journey map to build up your CX strategy is essential. Sometimes, individual touchpoints perform well even if the end-to-end journey satisfaction is low. It’s important to optimize customer journeys and not merely the touchpoints.
Playing a critical role in customer experience, journey insights empower you to understand your customers better and frame up your conversations with them accordingly. Moreover, it drives your business forward by reaching out to the customers with relevant information at every stage of the journey.
Path insights
Making CX decisions on the basis of correlation analysis is where most businesses fail. For instance, on getting to know that 60% of your detractors are millennials, you start focusing on older customers. The real insight you need to focus on is the reason behind your detractors’ frustration. That’s where path insights could help.
Instead of considering the direct cause, path insights help you uncover the experience drivers that impact customer behavior. Without digging into the proximal cause, it’s impossible to address the issues that your customers are facing.
Transformational insights
With every website visit, conversation, or product purchase, businesses gather a lot of information about their customers’ behavior. Combining this data together can help to uncover valuable insights into your customers’ preferences. With seamless integration of transactional as well as operational data into the customer journey, these insights help you identify trends across various functional groups. Instead of relying on what customers say they want, these insights help you understand what they actually need.
Significance of Customer Experience (CX) Metrics
Gaining meaningful CX insights into your business can be done by choosing the right set of metrics. An effective metric not only helps to gain CX insights at every touchpoint of the customer journey but also empowers businesses to enhance their frontline operations and strengthen customer relationships. Here’s how you can identify insightful CX metrics for targeting improvement to your CX:
Choosing a key metric that measures customer satisfaction
To evaluate their CX levels, most of the businesses consider metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), or Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT). Using any of these key metrics help companies to gauge customer intent and gain insights into the issues faced by them in the journey. Also, these metrics can be useful to assess business performance and evaluate the impact of business challenges over customer perceptions.
Identifying performance-based metrics that customers are concerned about
Collecting data doesn’t mean you need to include them on the CX dashboard. Leveraging metrics like problem resolution rate or First Contact Resolution help to uncover effective insights into customer perceptions. For instance, resolving customer issues at a faster pace makes them happy and satisfied. Thus, the problem resolution rate can be considered a valuable metric for your CX dashboard. Focusing on metrics that matter to your customers will help your team to uncover CX insights that drive performance gains in numerous areas.
By unveiling the hidden opportunities, CX insights provide an effective way of enriching the customer experience which makes them essential for your business success.
This article was originally published on the author’s blog and reprinted with permission.
