Anyone with some level of experience in the post-digital business world knows of the importance of customer experience analytics. In the business universe, the customer’s sum experience with a company from awareness via marketing, to their research, actual consumption of a product or service, and any possible interactions via customer service or support are the name of the game. Customers make a business, and without them, there’s really no point to anything.
Tracking analytics has become a science of its own, and the intricacies and complexities involved vary depending on the type of analytics, and the nature of the niche they are in. One of the first things that really matters when preparing to engage in any kind of analytics tracking is in fact to determine the priority data points worth focusing on above all others.
That in mind, we need to decide right now, what are the most important customer experience analytics to track? Without knowing this, you not only won’t be very efficient in gathering and defining metrics, but you’ll be remiss in picking the proper tools that best suit you for this process. So, let’s take a look at what I and my colleagues pretty much unanimously agree are the most important ones.
#1 – Total Volume by Channel
This is the base metric which will be integral to many others for ratios, demarcations and much more. In the modern world, if you’re smart, you have support and service channels of numerous nature, such as social support, help desks, forums and even self service, rather than just limiting your channels to the call center.
Knowing the volume of calls for each channel, and thus having a good picture of the preferred communications channels of your primary markets is invaluable for obvious reasons.
#2 – Response Times
Some of my colleagues believe that speed isn’t the most important part of customer experience engagement, but I kind of disagree. Either way, we can all agree that having a strong picture of how quickly you can respond to a ticket or query within any given channel you use, alongside your volume per channel, can help you find ways to improve your customer service and support – one of the biggest parts of customer experience.
Also, you need to know which channels have the most problems in ratio to volume of queries, so you know how to prioritize any adjustments or improvements as well.
#3 – Intensive Customer Feedback
Finally, while this is hard to quantize, intensive customer feedback information is an important analytic to track. This consists of a number of sources such as surveys, posts on social networks regarding their experience, as well as one-way engagement where they submit via forums, comments or email, their issues and positive remarks about your product or service to you.
This is actually multiple analytics, including ratios of positive to negative responses to different attributes, as well as the most frequent issues and requests given. With this, you have a good view of room for improvement of your product or service, as well as a secondary dimension to looking at issues customers may have with your service and support aspects as well.
Of honorable mention are first call resolution rates, though they don’t correlate with the others, they are important to keep an eye on. The same can be said for the vaunted “wow factor” with customers, but while I think that’s significant, I don’t really see how you can get hard data on it, nor quantify it to begin with.
The three customer experience analytics I focused on here correlate directly together, and as such, they form a super-analytic that is vital. It may seem like these are “support and service” issues, but remember, some of these queries will be from the first phase of experience, where customers research your service or product as well, and you don’t want that to go wrong!
