By Pablo Cerri and EloGroup’s Customer Experience squad
- Customer Experience (CX) is an efficient strategy for companies to overcome the commoditization of services.
- CX takes a special look at the consumer’s experience and perceptions of your brand before, during and after the sale.
- Know the metrics that help to understand the customer’s feelings, based on their feedback.
The service industry is currently undergoing a process that has already been felt in the primary and secondary sectors, where customers no longer perceive a difference between what the various competitors offer. This phenomenon, known as “commoditization”, can be seen in areas such as telecommunications, aviation and financial services. Pay-TV packages, for example, hardly differentiate themselves in the products they offer. As a result, the players in these markets tend to compete on price, causing their margins to flatten.
To escape this movement, many companies have realized the importance of investing in Customer Experience (CX), a special look at the experience and perceptions that consumers have of the brand before, during and after the sale. Since you cannot manage what you cannot measure, it is of the utmost importance to check metrics and indicators based on a deep understanding of the consumer’s journey, their life cycle and touchpoints.
By “touchpoint” we mean the moment when the customer interacts directly with the company, setting up active communication in specific scenarios. This can happen almost imperceptibly – when looking at a billboard in the street, for example – but it can also be an interactive situation, through adverts on social networks, sponsored events and chatbots (robots that interact automatically with consumers in online chat applications), or even through a human agent from personalized sales, commercial meetings or face-to-face appointments.
It is therefore important to understand that the user experience does not just include the call center or chat support offered after a product has been sold or a service has been provided. It includes all the moments in which it is possible to delight the customer through differentiated actions along the consumer journey. In any case, it is recommended that you formulate a strategy focused on this after-sales sector. After all, when you give customers more than they expect, you reduce negative word of mouth and take a big step towards building customer loyalty. Considering the commoditization scenario, guaranteeing this maintenance is essential for recovering margins.
For that reason, to understand the customer’s feelings towards the company, it is important to know the metrics based on the consumer’s own feedback.
| METRICS BASED ON THE CONSUMER’S OWN FEEDBACK |
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NPS – NET PROMOTER SCORE: “What is the chance that you will indicate our company, product or service to a friend?” |
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Reflets the satisfaction level and loyalty on a scale from 0 to 10 that points out the disposition indicating the company. |
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CSAT – CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SCORE: “How do you evaluate your experience with our company?” |
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Aims to reflect about the perception of direct satisfaction and/or unsatisfaction, usually on a scale from 0 to 5 (it can be used other types of scale, using, for example, stars or emojis). |
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CES – CUSTOMER EFFORT SCORE: “How difficult it was to stablish a relationship with our company?” |
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Aims to analyse the client’s loyalty from the effort spent to determine the customer experience, usually with five possible options of response between the extremes. |
- NPS – Net Promoter Score (“How likely are you to recommend our company, product or service to a friend?”): It seeks to reflect the level of satisfaction and loyalty, with a scale from 0 to 10 that shows the greater or lesser willingness to make a recommendation. The indicator is obtained by calculating: (% of scores 9 and 10) – (% of scores 0 to 6). It has the advantage of being short, which increases response rates and generates high comparability. However, as it is a generic question, it is not very actionable if it is not complemented by other questions;
- CSAT – Customer Satisfaction Score (“How do you rate your experience with our company?”): It seeks to reflect the perception of satisfaction and/or unsatisfaction in a direct way, traditionally on a scale of 1 to 5 (you can also use other scales, stars, emojis). Obtained by adding the scores above the median (neither satisfied nor dissatisfied) divided by the total number of answers obtained, resulting in the overall satisfaction percentage. As it allows for a wide range of questions and openings by reason or attribute, it is extremely versatile, but as it is focused on a specific moment in the journey or product/service, it does not accurately reflect the reality of the relationship. It can be replaced by the percentage of negative experiences, in which the Yes/No question is asked: “Are you satisfied with our service/product?”; and
- CES – Customer Effort Score (“How difficult was it to relate to our company?”): It aims to analyze customer loyalty through the effort spent on a given consumer experience, usually with 5 response options between the extremes. The sum of the scores above the median divided by the total shows the overall ease percentage. CES can prove more precisely the points that need to be improved in the journey, but it doesn’t delve into the root cause.
We realize, then, that monitoring metrics based on customer feedback is necessary, but not sufficient. The tools give us clues as to how the experience is going, but on their own they do not provide a deeper understanding of the causes behind these feelings.
That is where operational metrics come in. By checking the performance of a sector within the company, these indicators will help us to understand the reason for the positive or negative responses from customers. Based on this analysis, they will promote both internal and external changes. These mechanisms measure data then will offer more insights into the operation and, thus, reveal details of the customer experience that cannot be found through questions.
Let’s focus on the example of the customer service area, a strategic department within companies, responsible for attracting and keeping customer loyalty and capable of transmitting user perceptions to other sectors. To help us understand the reasons behind the feedback, we can measure it:
- Average Service Time (ATT) – This is the average time taken to complete an interaction. It considers the time the customer interacted with the chatbot, the human and their time on hold. You should not always aim for the lowest possible TMA. Some problems are complex and require more time to resolve, preventing the customer from having to seek support again;
- Average Waiting Time (AHT) – This should always be as short as possible. A report published by Zendesk revealed that more than 55% of customers consider that waiting prolonged periods to interact with an agent is a frustrating aspect that makes their experience poor. The metric identifies how long a customer has waited in the queue to be attended to, regardless of the communication channel;
- Initial Response Time – How long does it take your team to signal to the customer that they are being heard? The average should also be as short as possible;
- First Call Resolution (FCR) – Checks how many calls were resolved on the first contact. Helps analyze the performance of support agents;
- Number of calls answered and missed – This is a survey of the number of calls to assess the size of the workforce and the technologies used by the sector;
- Abandonment rate – This is the rate of customers who have given up on receiving service from the company while in contact. It shows the need for improvements in the support department and shows the chances that the consumer will seek out a competitor that offers better service; and
- IVR/Chatbot retention rate – The rate of customers who contact the company to clarify a question or solve a problem, and the issue is resolved only by the automations programmed into the phone line or support chat, without the need for a human agent to intervene. A high rate can lead to greater customer satisfaction, as they are attended to quickly, but the opposite can signal a need for improvements in automation.
| OPERATIONAL METRICS |
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AVERAGE SERVICE TIME (ATT) |
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Average time taken to complete an interaction. |
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AVERAGE WAITING TIME (AHT) |
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Identifies how long a customer has waited in the queue to be attended to, regardless of the communication channel. |
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INITIAL RESPONSE TIME |
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How long does it take your team to signal to the customer that they are being heard. |
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FIRST CALL RESOLUTION (FCR) |
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Checks how many calls were resolved on the first contact. |
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NUMBER OF CALLS ANSWERED AND MISSED |
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Survey of the number of calls to manage the size of the workforce and the technologies used by the sector. |
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ABANDONMENT RATE |
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Rate of customers who have given up on receiving service from the company while in contact. |
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IVR/CHATBOT RETENTION RATE |
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Rate of customers who contact the company to clarify a question or solve a problem, and the issue is resolved only by the automations programmed into the phone line or support chat, without the need for a human agent to intervene. |
Intelligent management of these metrics offers important insights that reveal how the customer journey is progressing at the service stage.
A TME of 25 minutes shows that the customer waited in the line for that long listening to the music selected by the company. This is a customer who could easily seek the same solution from a competitor.
A high IVR retention rate combined with a low TME and a high TMA, on the other hand, not only shows that the automation of the telephone line is able to resolve a large part of the customer’s problems, but also that the team of agents can resolve these issues calmly, since the queue of people on hold has decreased.
Since these customers generally had more complicated problems that were not solved by the IVR, it makes sense to assume that a pleasant experience would be one of careful, rather than rushed, service. These are just a few examples of operational metrics used today.
Of course, depending on the industry in which the company is positioned, in addition to its size, its target audience and, above all, its strategy, other indicators can – and should – also be monitored.
This follow-up also helps you to better understand who your customer is, answering questions such as: “What time does my customer come to me the most?”; “Should I have more operators available?”; “What is the rate of human calls that could have been resolved by automation?”; and “Is the problem in the automation or in the customer’s level of understanding?”.
By better understanding the profile of the consumer, customer experience raises the questions necessary for the company to achieve the best possible service and fulfil the expectations of its public.
Investment in CX results in more satisfied clients, what, therefore, contributes to an increase in revenue and loyalty rates, a reduction in spending on customer acquisition costs, the maintenance of the brand’s image and contributing to a more positive promotion of the company, all extremely relevant effects in a context of the commoditization of services.
PABLO CERRI works as Manager at EloGroup.
