Your customers are counting on you to provide something specific when they need it. But aside from supplying whatever item or service you’re in the business of, what are they expecting from you? Do you know what they’re looking for? When they reach out for support do you know what it is that they need most from your support team? Read on to find out more about how customer experience KPI’s can help.
What are KPIs?
KPIs, or key performance indicators, are specific methods that were developed to measure just how happy your customers are with your service. These KPIs are extremely important for you and your team to be aware of and monitor, so you don’t run the risk of losing customers simply because you’re not responding to their needs in the right way.
Why KPIs?
The simple answer is that these metrics let you evaluate how your customer service team is interacting with your customers. Even more importantly, they let you see how your customers feel about the way that your customer service team is interacting with them. After all, even if your team is doing exactly what you want them to do and following the policies you have in place for interactions, that doesn’t mean that your customers are actually happy about those interactions.
Therefore, to get a well-rounded picture of the customer service experience, the process of measuring these customer experience KPIs is actually two-fold:
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Firstly, you can see if your customer service personnel are doing what you want them to in their interactions with customers. Are they following the rules or the policies that you have put in place? When and why are they not following those rules? By honing in on the customer interaction with each member of your team, you can see where problems arise. You may even be able to find gaps in the policies or areas where things just don’t work in practice.
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On the other side of things, you can see how your customers feel about those interactions. If customers are reacting negatively to customer service representatives who are following the rules and policies, why are they unhappy? Is there a problem with the policy? Should changes be made? Are there problems with the service or product being provided to customers? What could you do to make your customers happier and make them want to come back again?
By looking at your customer experience KPIs you can help improve the situation for your team as well as your customers, which means less staff turnover and more customer retention at the same time.
That’s going to be a double win for you.
The Complexity of Evaluating Customer Satisfaction
It might seem simple to evaluate just how well your team is doing and how your customers are feeling. But evaluating customer satisfaction is actually more difficult than you would think. And because it’s so important, you definitely need to find out as much as you can about it, and how to implement those evaluations into your business. So, what is it really all about? And how does using KPI to measure customer service get you to better end user experience satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is usually monitored based on feedback directly by the customer themselves. While you can take a look at customer interactions with your team and create a somewhat objective scale of their satisfaction based on that interaction, this can be less effective than talking directly with your customers.
Chances are you’ve had to speak with a representative online before, either through a chat service or an email service. And you may have received a brief survey after the fact that you were asked to fill out related to the service. These surveys often have questions or statements such as ‘was your problem resolved today?’ with ‘yes or no’ options or numbers from 0-10.
You may also have a one-question survey to assist with evaluating customer service. These are more likely to get a response, but may not give you as much information overall. Still, they’re a good customer service performance evaluation, and they make the process a little bit easier for you overall.
The goal is to get customers to rate how they felt about different aspects of the service that they received. The ratings are then compiled together to give an overall picture of how well (or not-so-well) the customer service team is doing when it comes to meeting customer needs or expectations when they reach out.
Keep in mind that these ratings aren’t grouped together on a one-by-one basis. They need to be evaluated and compiled using complex algorithms that allow you to see the most important patterns and areas for improvement. This helps you get more information with a lot less time, because individual responses may skew the results; what you’re looking for is a larger overall sense based on averages from larger groups of customer responses.
Top Metrics for Customer Experience KPIs
When it comes to using KPI to measure customer satisfaction and matrix customer service, you want to be sure you’re spending your time and money on services that give you the best results. Well, we’re going to take a look at some of the top choices when it comes to customer journey KPIs. That way, you can make sure that you’re making the most out of your time and learning how to answer the critical question of ‘How do you measure customer satisfaction KPI?’
- CSAT
CSAT is a customer satisfaction score and it’s one of the most important things to look at. It’s also relatively simple because it simply asks how satisfied the customer was with the company, product, service, or interaction that they experienced.
This type of survey offers five options for a customer to respond, which range from ‘very unsatisfied’ to ‘very satisfied.’ From there, results are either averaged or expressed on a percentage basis to showcase the overall rating.
The gold standard for this type of survey result is 80% satisfaction, and you should aim to get survey responses from at least 25-50% of your customers. On average, however, ratings show approximately a 74.4% satisfaction rate.
- NPS
NPS is a net promoter score, and it’s all about determining whether your customers are coming back. This is another simple one for the customer, but the algorithm on the back end can be complex. It involves asking customers if they would recommend your product or service and gives them a number scale from 0-10.
Once the numbers come in, the percentage of detractors (people who rate less than 6) is substracted from the percentage of promoters (people who rate 9 or 10). This gives you your net promoter score. Those who rate your business as a 7 or 8 are not scored as they are considered ‘neutral.’
The goal for NPS ratings is approximately 73, though the average generally falls at about 43.
- CES
CES is a customer effort score and it actually looks at what kind of work the customer had to do in the process of working on the problem. For example, it might say ‘x company made it easy to resolve this problem.’ The customer is then given options of 1-5 or 1-7 with ratings of ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree.’
In order to determine what your overall score is, look at the percentage of customers who are rating you with either a 4 or a 5. This is the level of success that you have overall.
A good CES score is considered to be at least a 5 on a 7-point scale, with increases in loyalty occurring as customers move up the scale.
What Can You Do To Improve?
There are several ways that you can look at improving your overall metrics when it comes to customer journey metrics and customer experience KPIs. If you really want to make things as high quality as possible, you’re going to need to look at some of the specific ways that your customers respond or reach out to your team.
If you notice that they are reaching out for the same problem consistently, or that the same situation is often resulting in similar poor feedback, it could be an issue with the service. For example, if customers are consistently unhappy with the service they receive when they reach out about broken items, it could be a problem with the policy in place regarding broken items.
If they are reaching out consistently because of a lack of understanding on how to assemble the product, it could be a problem with the instructions provided. You can then take a look at each of these things and see what it is that your customers are going through and how you can make the interaction process a lot easier.
One of the biggest ways to handle these problems and more is by offering live chat services. Why offer live chat services? Because managed live chat offers customers someone they can explain the nuances of their situation to. This gives them personalized attention and personalized support, which is sure to increase your customer experience KPIs in no time.
Working with Managed Live Chat Customer Service
Chat with Humans is a managed live chat support system that provides your customers with more attentive and detailed support when they need it. Rather than ‘speaking’ with an automated system that has very few options, being able to engage in a managed online chat makes your customers feel heard, understood, and supported.
When you’re ready to make a change and start improving your customer experience KPIs, it’s time to switch to managed live chat online and Chat with Humans can help you do it!
