{"id":7353,"date":"2019-08-15T15:54:44","date_gmt":"2019-08-15T22:54:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zightwebprd.wpengine.com\/measure-effectiveness-of-your-customer-experience-strategy\/"},"modified":"2023-07-30T06:42:19","modified_gmt":"2023-07-30T13:42:19","slug":"measure-effectiveness-of-your-customer-experience-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zight.com\/blog\/measure-effectiveness-of-your-customer-experience-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Customer Experience Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Once you\u2019ve established that your business needs a customer experience strategy, and you come up with a plan to ensure that company values reflect the importance of service-mindedness, it\u2019s not enough to simply implement activities. As with any growth methodology for marketing and sales, you need to be sure that your customer experience strategy is working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Evaluating your strategy can have several different subjective and objective elements, and should be measured against KPIs that makes sense for your business and goals. But most importantly, you should be measuring the effectiveness of your customer experience<\/a> strategy during and<\/em> after the customer lifecycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So why should you take the time and effort to measure your customer\u2019s experiences? The simple answer is to ensure that your efforts are paying off. But the more complex answer is that with so many different customer engagement<\/a> strategies in modern business running in tandem, you need to be able to have clear attribution for successes, and understand where missing pieces and gaps are in your handling of the overall customer lifecycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since we don\u2019t talk about the customer journey as a \u201cfunnel\u201d as much anymore, and can now view it as a cycle or a \u201cflywheel\u201d methodology in which we are continually engaging prospects and re-engaging customers, it\u2019s important to have clear indicators for performance for sales, marketing, customer experience, and each element that comprises those aspects of business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u200d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So maybe you understand that it\u2019s important to be measuring customer engagement, but it can be easier said than done. When it comes to customer sentiment, there are often both qualitative and quantitative measurements to take in order to get the full picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike marketing or sales where we only need to look at hard numbers like conversion rates and average purchase value, customer engagement often requires more context, and can be much more individual. Because of this, some businesses struggle to find a clear way to measure, and can be unsure of when<\/em> to measure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What we can do, however, is understand that as with any kind of data analysis, we need a standard or a rubric to measure against. While industry standards are still iffy since true customer engagement strategy is relatively new, you can easily use your own data to measure against to identify patterns, issues, and opportunities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To start properly measuring customer engagement, there are a few tools you should be using.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u200d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking of retention rates and churn<\/a>, customer experience strategy comes with its own set of important data points that need to be understood and prioritized. Not all data is created equal, and not all the information you receive about customers and their interactions with you will be useful for understanding the effectiveness of your strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To decide which KPIs to measure against for your business, you likely should start by thinking about your actual products and services and the industry that you\u2019re in. You should also know that collecting qualitative data<\/a> can be so important because quantitative data doesn\u2019t always give us the full picture when it comes to customer experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, say you are a B2C SaaS company. You have a very low rate for customer complaints and service tickets, but you are still finding you have a quite high customer churn. A low volume of customer complaints likely sounds great. But perhaps the reason the number is low is that the experience provided to your customers by customer service is so bad, they simply would rather unsubscribe from your platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Getting more context and deciding what KPIs are truly indicators of success, will help you to not focus time and energy on assessing data that is less important for understanding your customer experiences, or doesn\u2019t really give you the full picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u200d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s crucial that in order to measure effectiveness of customer experience strategy, you should be taking heat checks at each phase of the customer journey. If you are only measuring customer experience after the purchase is made, you wind up perhaps missing some crucial elements where 1) the experience isn\u2019t necessarily as fresh in their mind as it would be in real-time evaluations, and 2) you miss opportunities to address bad experiences that can still turn into sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aside from checking review sites, social media, and getting feedback, you should look to a few different areas that can help show you the effectiveness of your customer experience strategy:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conversion rates are an important metric for many different parts of business. We know our marketing funnel is working when we have high conversion rates on landing pages, and we know our sales team is effective when we have high conversion rates of leads to customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When it comes to customer experience, these numbers can be important to look at to also indicate that users are actually enjoying their journey with you. Pay attention to the percentage of users responding to feedback forms, or the percentage of users who utilize customer experience tools such as chat functions, demo requests, or tutorials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also take into consideration usage rates, site traffic, and content consumption. If you find that a customer is not logging in or using your platform regularly, there might be an issue with their experience with you. Or, on the other hand, if a user is viewing a lot of your content, repeatedly returning to your website, or engaging in other ways, you may be providing them with the right level of service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of customer service, complaint handling, and issue resolution, time is particularly of the essence. First response time is the time it takes for a customer to receive a response to their inquiry or issue, and average handling time is the length of time it takes to actually resolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These two KPIs can be extremely indicative to a lapse in your customer experience strategy. When these averages are high, customers can become frustrated, perceive you to be disorganized, or as if you do not value them. Remember that when dealing with a service phone line or chat function, customers will expect immediacy. There is more leniency given when it comes to email and ticket submissions such as through your actual support system. But, it\u2019s crucial to manage expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can survive longer wait times, if you are at least communicating to your prospects and customers in a way that manages their expectations and results in resolutions that don\u2019t leave them disappointed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u200d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then of course it\u2019s necessary to measure customer experience<\/a> after the decision and during the delight stages of the customer lifecycle. While this may be the easier part, it\u2019s important to compare after-sale sentiment and customer service metrics with the pre-purchase part of the journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy is it Important to Measure Customer Experience Strategy?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How Do you Measure Customer Engagement?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Deciding the Right KPIs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Measure Customer Experience During the Customer Journey<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
1. Conversion and usage rates<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
2. First response and average handling time<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Customer Experience After the Customer Journey<\/h2>\n\n\n\n