Have you been asked to fill out a customer survey in the last few months? If you answered yes, we’re not surprised.
According to Gartner, more than 5,000 global organizations have a dedicated customer experience (CX) leader who reports directly to their CEO. Gartner also suggests that the number will only increase, underscoring the importance of CX to a business’s bottom line.
It’s comprehensible, given that customer experience is directly tied to satisfaction and loyalty.
As we’ve previously written, this type of positive ongoing relationship encourages existing customers to keep returning to your business – time and time again. Naturally, this suggests that accurately gauging your customer experience is crucial if you want your organization to succeed.
If that last sentence left you winded, don’t worry. In this blog, we’ll explore the customer experience further and highlight methods and helpful resources to measure yours.
#1 Using Software to Measure the Customer Experience
Did you know that most large organizations (ones with annual revenue over $1 billion) examine anywhere from 50 to 200 CX metrics? That number may seem alarming, but most fall into categories like:
- Customer satisfaction, including a direct CSAT score and others like product review ratings.
- Customer loyalty or retention, such as an outright Customer Retention Rate (CRR) or Customer Effort Score (CES).
- Advocacy or brand, like trust ratings or Net Promoter Scores (NPS).
- Quality of operations, which can include metrics related to a service or product meeting customer expectations.
- Employee engagement, or measurements on how happy your customer support agents and other team members are (ePNS measures this).
With so much to look at it, it may seem like an uphill battle, but it’s not. Software like Zendesk and Salesforce can make defining these metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) simple. Both systems provide a data-driven analysis of your customer experience in one platform, so you don’t have to dig around for information from disparate sources.
Zendesk and Salesforce also integrate with Agatha so that you can dive deep into CX analytics. You can see trends like an increase or decrease in tickets. Your teams can calculate departmental performance as well as individual agents. You’ll also be able to find any gaps in your support content or strategies. Essentially, by implementing these tools together, you can track the metrics that matter most to your team and customers.
#2 Surveying Your Customers
Even with the right tools, you and your team still need to put in the work to delight your customers. You do want a high NPS score, right?
The tried and true way to gather this data is by collecting customer feedback and measuring customer satisfaction. This generally takes the form of a customer survey, but it’s essential to know when to send one out. If you catch someone at the wrong time, your scores could suffer.
So, how do you know when to reach out? You must map your customer journey from start to finish. Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service and how they feel along the way. There are typically four phrases, including inquiry, comparison, purchase, and installation (note: there are different terminologies to represent these different phases).
Based on this, you wouldn’t want to ask for feedback in the comparison stage, or you may come off as overbearing. You’d likely want to ask during the purchase or installation phases, but the ultimate choice of when will depend on the individual.
Thankfully, a customer journey map can help with that and inform any questions you may want to ask in a survey or follow-up. That’s because it shows you just how a person moves through your funnel, revealing any helpful, disjointed, or even painful experiences.
With this information, you can effectively gather customer feedback, weigh what’s important, make improvements where needed, and ideally, score a high NPS score!
#3 Training Your Service Team
Your customer support agents are your secret weapon for measuring the customer experience and inching toward higher and higher loyalty scores.
That is – if they’re prepared.
Onboarding and ongoing professional development are crucial to any agent’s success, and they’re both needed for measuring CX and encouraging positive experiences. If they don’t know where to find historical documentation to answer a ticket, KPIs like First-Contact Resolution (FCR) and Average Response Time (ART) can flounder. When an agent feels stressed and overwhelmed, they feel less engaged.
It can quickly snowball into a huge mess unless you do something about it.
Tools like Agatha Assist make getting new agents up to speed fast by showing them exactly where the data they need is located. Agatha Solve can strengthen confidence by providing accurate answers quickly. And all the Agatha tools give you the much-needed capacity to train your agents.
With that time, you and your agents can develop processes to improve CX. You can work together to “socially listen” or look for customer pain points on social media and provide solutions. You can show them all the different places to ask for feedback and offer guidance on voice and tone.
You can be a real team, which will help improve your eNPS scores, which improves CSAT, which consequently skyrockets NPS.
Before we go snowballing again, let’s wrap it all up.
#4 Measuring Using AI like Agatha
Using the correct tools like Agatha can help you measure your customer experience in multiple ways (specifically, the ones we’ve outlined!)
First, you can deploy Agatha at different stages of your customer journey, notably purchase and installation, offering a more cohesive experience. Agatha can help onboard and train your agents to improve their satisfaction in their roles. And lastly, Agatha works in tandem with Salesforce and Zendesk, directly tracking different KPIs using her robust, built-in analytics and offering simple ways to make improvements.
If you’re interested in learning more about Agatha, please reach out!
