How do you know you’re doing right by your customers?
Customer experience metrics, customer success metrics, client satisfaction metrics, and more have exploded in the last five years. The gold standard is still NPS or Net Promoter Score.
NPS was initially pioneered at Intuit and Sprint back in the early 2000s, and it’s only grown consistently since. We use it at Conectys; for 2019, we actually had a client NPS of 94, which is considered globally elite. (Yay!) To calculate NPS, you craft a simple survey with the question of “On a scale of 0-10, how likely is it that you’d recommend our organization/product/service/customer service to a friend or colleague?” (Notice the wording allows you to deploy this tool with employees or customers.)
Once you get the scores back, anyone 0-6 is a “detractor.” 7-8 scores are “passives.” 9-10 scores are “promoters.”
Here’s how you do the calculation:
- Enter all of the survey responses into an Excel spreadsheet
- Now, break down the responses by Detractors, Passives, and Promoters
- Add up the total responses from each group
- To get the percentage, take the group total and divide it by the total number of survey responses
- Now, subtract the percentage total of Detractors from the percentage total of Promoters—this is your NPS score
In short, it’s the number of promoter scores minus the number of detractor scores, then divided by the total number of respondents and multiplied by 100.
That’s one option for customer experience metrics. What other options do you have at scale?
More customer experience metrics to consider for high-growth, rapidly-scaling companies
A few to consider:
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): We’ve been using different tools to measure and drive customer loyalty for years, including CSAT scores, which is a broad umbrella term for different approaches to measuring customer experience and satisfaction. We view the distinction between “CSAT” and “NPS” as the number of questions. NPS is just the one question described above. CSAT surveys have more questions. Because people are busy, and because right now the focus of many businesses is either (a) keeping the lights on or (b) dealing with increased demand (such as companies with UGC platforms), people don’t necessarily want to spend time filling out long questionnaires. So, you can get more depth with CSAT, but you tend to get a lower number of responses. With NPS, you get a higher number of responses, and it’s an easier number to track overtime — easy to see if it goes up or down, too — but it’s just a response to one question at various points in time, so it’s not as detailed.
- Voice of the customer: This can get you much more detailed information. Some different VOC approaches include customer interviews, bringing customers on-site, analyzing live chat logs, social media responses, website heat maps (what people seem to be looking for/where they’re going), online customer reviews, focus groups, and, yes, tools like NPS fall under the voice of the customer approaches. Many VOC approaches can be cost-prohibitive for some companies, but it does get you the most robust data possible. Sitting and having a 45-minute discussion with a decision-maker at one of your client companies is one of the most impactful things you can do. It’s hard to carve out time for those moments, and right now in-person + travel makes it challenging, but it can yield remarkable insights about how to better serve that customer and where to take your business overall.
- First, call resolution: We’ve blogged about this before, even years ago. The name explains it: it’s the percentage of customer issues that can be resolved on the first call. A higher FCR tends to lead to higher NPS and CSAT overall. If you focus on an omnichannel strategy for customer experience, i.e. a customer can reach you on chat, social media, etc, etc… then sometimes you will see the total volume of calls reduce over time, meaning customers don’t even need to pick up the phone to get a resolution! That’s a win in and of itself.
The bottom line
Right now, and definitely going forward in global business, data really is business. You need to collect the right data, scrub that data (make sure it’s clean), organize that data, analyze that data, present it to your decision-makers, and let the data inform the next steps. We do this internally — in terms of how we approach and roll out new programs for employees — and we do it with every client we have as well. Data drives everything. ConectysOS, our proprietary software, is an omnichannel CRM that helps get clients relevant CX data in real-time.
That “data” is a mix of surveys, conservations, call recordings, logs, and much more. But to ensure success for any client we have, regardless of size or industry, we track their customer experience, respond to that data, and adjust the relationship as need be. If you ever need help knowing what to track or what to listen to or how to best analyze it, don’t hesitate to reach out.
