Measuring Customer Experience: How to Collect the Right Data and Act on It

It is essential for a company to understand the behavior, opinions, and needs of their customers to provide the best service possible. A business’s relationship with its clientele is a foundational necessity, and just like any other relationship, if one side does not understand the other, the partnership is destined to fail. By measuring customer experience, companies can easily become more educated about customer behavior and opinions. This information can, in turn, influence product updates, customized offerings, and internal workflows. It is important that companies collect this valuable voice of customer data, and then use it to best leverage results into effective action. 

The Importance of Measuring Customer Experience

By measuring customer experience, you can view how your clients interact with your product on a daily basis and the level of satisfaction they get with your service. Once these metrics are recorded, you can use this information to proactively engage customers and meet their needs in a more personalized way. This helps create a customer-centric culture within your company that prioritizes positive interactions and high customer satisfaction throughout the journey from onboarding to renewal.

By tracking customer experience, you can gain valuable insight into your customers’ day-to-day with your services, including:

• How much they understand your product

• How comfortably they can integrate the product into their daily workflow

• How easily they can access support/educational materials

• How valued they feel as customers

There are a variety of surveys and metrics you can use to measure these different elements.

Customer Experience Measurement Techniques 

Over the years, companies have been measuring customer experience using an array of different methods. Through these various approaches, a reliable picture of your clients’ thoughts and feelings becomes apparent. Some of the most prominent of these measurement techniques include the following:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This industry-standard measurement centers around how likely your customers are to recommend your product to a peer. There is an index that scores customer satisfaction on a scale of zero to ten. NPS divides customers into “promoters” (those who rank high at nine-to-ten), “neutral” (seven-to-eight), and “detractors” (zero-to-6). Generally sent to customers right after onboarding or other key events, this data can be utilized to leverage success by:

• Helping you perfect your onboarding process. 
• Following-up with detractors to solve their dissatisfaction and establish an action plan based on their business goals and monitored feature usage.
• Anticipating which customers are viable candidates for upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
• Tracking the progress of customer satisfaction to judge the success of proactive measures.
• Asking promoters to participate in a case study, serve as a reference, or speak at an event.
• Offering your clients features relevant to their industries and their usage patterns (e.g. expanded license caps, training opportunities, storage capacity, etc.).

Additionally, this information can be useful for identifying patterns between what makes a highly satisfied customer and what makes a deeply unsatisfied customer. Do their industries play a significant role in their satisfaction? Does the stage of the customer journey make a difference? Did certain features play a part? Is there a connection between using older software and lower satisfaction?

Periodically evaluating these metrics can make you more aware of your customers’ needs and, if necessary, pivot in a timely manner.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT)

While NPS focuses on general satisfaction with your company/product, CSAT scores are related to specific interactions and are generally administered after training, an online purchase, or on a monthly basis, to name just a few. Especially pertinent to customer service, these scores reflect elements such as agent responsiveness during a support call or how helpful/accurate the delivered information was. You can leverage CSAT scores to do the following:

• Alert a CSM to customers who might need extra support and a follow-up
• Identify bottlenecks in your customer journey
• Gauge the effectiveness of your customer education touchpoints 
• Develop training modules to address weak points, as well as fix software bugs

Consistently reviewing these scores allows you to pinpoint common areas of dissatisfaction and work on improving them. 

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Generally deployed after onboarding, CES measures how much effort a customer had to exert before finding a solution to a problem or access to a service. As opposed to measuring general feelings, CES aims to form a picture on specific issues—was a customer able to easily contact an agent to resolve an issue? Was their request completed in a timely manner? Were there resources readily available?

Generally measured with effort scores (e.g. the task required “low effort” vs. “high effort”), these scores can point towards difficult processes or demonstrate how effective the onboarding process was. Additionally, the tracking of these scores enables you to reach out to customers who have been experiencing trouble in order to provide personalized assistance. 

Of course, to take these next steps and act on the information gathered by these surveys, you need a platform that will empower you to do so.

Turn Data into Action with a Customer Success Platform 

Using a customer success platform is the key to recording this information and turning it into beneficial action. A quality customer success platform will centralize customer experience data and discern patterns from it, allowing customer success teams to engage clients in personalized terms.

Totango’s Voice of the Customer SuccessBLOC helps you create a customer-centric experience by allowing you to gather, analyze, and incorporate customer feedback into your customer success strategies. By measuring customer experience, you can better understand your clients’ thoughts and experiences. Through the use of a customer success platform, these insights can turn into actionable metrics that will inform client campaigns. Do not stay in the dark when it comes to customer experience—drive retention and generate value by finding the right platform for your business. 

By using the right technology, you can increase the lifetime value of satisfied customers through expansion opportunities, while also working to improve your relationship with those clients who are more at-risk of churning. 

Totango’s customer success platform empowers businesses to measure customer experience to create more effective campaigns and deliver the best service possible. In these challenging times, you can’t afford to buy before you try. Get started for free today.