We all love a good acronym in the business world, actually scrap that….we love a good acronym in the world… OMG, lol, NQR, brb… and well, the CX world is no different. When kicking off your CX program there are lots you need to do and you can add to that list understanding all the different measurement tools available.
If you haven’t already, check out my blog: 4 Key Focus Areas for Mastering CX in 2018 and then come back and finish this blog!
When we start talking about feedback surveys, we typically break them down into two buckets – You’re either doing a transactional survey or a relationship survey. Both surveys provide highly valuable insight, the difference is the type of feedback you’re receiving.
A relationship survey is typically about the company as a whole with a wider focus on customer loyalty and centricity. It’s a great way to benchmark against a competitor or the industry and is typically done annually or bi-annually.
A transactional survey is a way to capture feedback from the front line. The core focus of transactional surveys is understanding how a certain experience, sale, delivery or touch point has impacted and effected that customer. This type of survey is typically used to diagnose a customer problem and make improvements to business processes. These types of surveys can be executed daily, weekly, post-delivery or sale or when you feel it’s appropriate.
Now we’ve got that out of the way lets talk about measurement tools! There are many different measurement tools you can use during either your relationship or transactional survey so let’s check them out.
Net Promoter Score – NPS
NPS was created to measure customer loyalty and to determine how likely it is that a customer will function as a brand ambassador of sorts, recommending your product or service to others.
The NPS system is created around one main question which is “how likely are you to recommend {insert business name | workshop | service} to a friend, colleague or family member?” The answer is on a scale of 0 to 10 which divides your customers into three key types of interactors:
- Promoters, who love your brand, service or product and actively recommend you to others
- Passives, who return themselves and like your product, but don’t try to recommend you to anyone else
- Detractors are not at all pleased and could even leave a negative review or complain about your business to others
NPS focuses on measuring long-term happiness and customer loyalty, giving you a metric to compare, measure and set KPI’s. You can add many different questions in this survey or keep it to a simple two-question survey. Asking the NPS main questions and then simply “tell us why?”.
Customer Satisfaction – CSAT
The CSAT is designed to measure how happy or satisfied a customer is with your business, your product or your team. Customers are asked to self-assess their level of happiness with one or more aspects of your business; collecting this data allows you to get a better understanding of how your business is performing. Each respondent must express their satisfaction for a certain topic on a score from 1-5.
CSAT is a useful score to measure the short-term happiness of your clients while giving you key areas to improve and ensuring you are taking care of your customers biggest complaints, issues and problems.
Customer Effort Score – CES
CES measures how hard or difficult it has been for a customer who is trying to buy or engage with your business. Your CES score can be a wakeup call for most businesses – if you are making your customers work too hard, they may go elsewhere. This can be from your website user experience, delivery, support, returning products to dealing with your call centre.
The most important aspect of this survey is to ensure you are not making your customer jump through too many hoops to get your attention.
My top tips:
- Use these metrics separately, or if you’re really clever to bring them all into play when you execute your feedback survey.
- Keep your survey clear, concise, simple and easy to understand for your customers. You don’t want someone to be spending more than 5 minutes on this!
- Make it easy to complete. Whether you are emailing, sending SMS’s, calling or having an online form, make sure it’s easy to submit and do some testing beforehand.
Regardless of what metric you use to measure loyalty and satisfaction in your business the real power comes from the FOLLOW UP. How are you letting your customers know about the changes and improvements you are making based on their feedback? Are you thanking them for taking the time and completing your survey? Are you sharing the results? If you answered no to any of these questions you are missing a trick.
If you’re interested in learning more about optimising and evolving your CX, reach out to us enquiries@milkit.com.au
This blog post was written by our very own CX expert and all-round legend, Nat!
Natalie Khoury has over 15 years’ experience in solution sales and customer experience. As a net promoter associate, Natalie’s knowledge and expertise help’s drive the success of our customers at Milk It Academy – a research-based training firm created to advance the everyday knowledge of professionals in marketing, UX, CX and solutions sales. For over a decade Natalie has worked with global brands including Experian, Connexity, Cheetah digital, Titan’s, Alfa Romeo and BlueChip IT.