A robust customer experience strategy is the cornerstone for many successful businesses. To measure the success of this strategy and make essential tweaks, metrics are often set to measure its impact on critical customer, agent, and business outcomes.
Those customer metrics are sometimes referred to as “customer engagement metrics”. Here are ten examples of those commonly utilized by many companies.
1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Measuring the happiness of customers, the satisfaction metric provides data that enables companies to track how the changes made to the CX strategy impact the customer base. At an individual level, the metric also allows companies to monitor when customers are unhappy. By doing so, the business can act to make amends with the customer, save the relationship, and protect revenues.
While companies traditionally measure CSAT through surveys at particular touchpoints in the customer journey, more advanced methods of monitoring the metric are evolving – which remove effort from the experience. Sentiment analysis is a particularly good example, enabling companies to track specific positive and negative emotions through assessing customer conversations.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Initially proposed in a 2003 Harvard Review article as: “The one number you need to grow,” NPS has become a customer engagement stalwart metric for many, measuring customer loyalty and their willingness to act as a brand advocate.
Instead of asking how satisfied the customer is with a product, service, or company, it asks how likely they are to recommend the product to a friend on a scale of zero to ten. Accordingly, they are classified as promoters, detractors, or neutral customers.
However, as with CSAT and CES (see metric number five), the metric is often adapted to measure specific touchpoints within the customer journey. For example:
- Rating the shipping experience after a product is delivered
- Rating a contact center experience after interacting with an agent
- Rating the first website visit for a new customer
- Rating a new product or subscription
3. Social Media Insights
The first touchpoint within the customer journey is the initial customer engagement. Often, this happens via social media, where customers see advertisements, reviews, and brand-related posts shared by others in their network who have purchased or subscribed to a product. Therefore, the number of likes, shares, poll participation, and group activity are important customer engagement metrics – especially for marketing.
However, companies can also track other metrics and filter feedback to spot trends in what customers say about the business with social listening technologies. If there is a problem, they can identify the root cause and improve CX. If the commentary is positive, companies may shine a spotlight on it and hook in new customers.
4. Bounce Rates
A bounce rate measures how often customers switch from one channel to another. Sometimes this is positive, as companies often wish to deflect customers to channels where they are more likely to enjoy an enhanced experience. Yet, other times it is bad. Consider the bounce rates in self-service. If customers seem to switch to a human support channel at a particular point in their self-service journey, that may highlight an error driving customer effort.
Therefore, understanding bounce rates across different channels and what they represent is often helpful for perfect digital customer experiences and channel deflection strategies.
5. Customer Effort Score (CES)
Another metric to stem from a Harvard Business Review article – this time entitled: “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” – this metric is based on the premise that reward customer journeys are not the fundamental driver of loyalty; frictionless experiences are.
Again, this is often measured through surveys – directly asking customers how easy their experience was. Yet, this is not conducive to a quick and effortless experience. As such, contact centers are looking toward other indicators of customer effort. This may include wait times and first contact resolution rates at the customer service touchpoint.
6. First Contact Resolution (FCR)
Making a repeat call for the same contact reason is tiresome. Knowing this, many contact centers track FCR to ensure that customers get all the information they require at the first point of contact.
By splitting FCR across various call reasons, contact centers can spot broken processes that add effort to customer journeys and inhibit the engagement that translates into loyalty.
The tricky part is measuring FCR. A combination of tracking repeat calls and accurate call dispositioning – now made possible through speech analytics advances – will help operations measure this metric effectively.
7. Customer Churn Rate
Customer churn rate – otherwise known as attrition or turnover – measures how many existing customers a company is losing over a pre-specified period. Some churn is inevitable, as customers may switch brands for multiple reasons. However, if a high churn rate becomes an ongoing trend over several months or years, the organization may have to revisit its CX strategy and address prominent causes.
Of course, spotting these causes is not easy. Yet, assessing customer feedback and complaint trends, alongside analyzing when spikes in customer churn occur, is often an excellent exercise.
8. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV forecasts the value that the average customer brings to the company. Tracking how this metric changes – when altering the CX strategy – enables companies to ensure that their actions positively impact long-term revenues instead of only acquiring short-term gains.
Also, CLV is often measured at an individual level. Doing so allows companies to prioritize high-value customers throughout the customer experience. For example, when they call into a contact center, they are often placed in a shorter call queue to receive faster service. As such, businesses can increase the chances of retaining customers that offer the most value.
9. Quality Scores
Quality scorecards measure how the performance of contact center agents impacts CX. Of course, they also have many other benefits – such as providing a source of motivation, tracking compliance, and assessing individual performance. Yet, quality scores empower agents to change their behaviors to better complement CX.
Measuring individual criteria within these scorecards may also allow the contact center to track trends within agent performance. By addressing these – on both a team and individual level – the operation can tactfully improve customer service experiences.
Eager to learn more critical contact center metrics? Then, check out our article: 40 Contact Center KPIs to Start Tracking Now
