What are the most important customer experience analytics? This is would seem like a tough one to answer, given customer experience covers a lot of individual fields that have their own little sets of analytics to OCD over. So, before we get into the analytics, there’s a mandatory look at what customer experience is.
You probably know what customer experience is, but before we define these customer experience analytics, it’s important to revisit this, so the analytics listed make sense. So bear with me here. So, what is customer experience? Recall that it’s the entire interaction a company has with a business. This begins with marketing, continues with research and comparison to competition, and finally includes the use of the product or service, and of course, closes with any customer service or support they may need in the end. So, what kind of fields are we getting analytics from, with that in mind? We’re getting marketing analytics, outreach analytics, CRM stuff, and the like. That’s a lot of information to track, so when you’re sitting above all these fields, and can’t nitpick over all the analytics a given one of those fields can … you have to pick some from each that matter the most for the big picture, right? Well, that’s still a lot of stuff, so below are just a handful of them, and why they matter.
#1 – Marketing Penetration
This is kind of a jumble of data, so it’s actually the sum of several marketing analytics consolidated for customer experience. This includes the number of marketing channels pursued, the rate of distribution, and the number of incoming prospects from each channel and individual campaigns. Backlinking software usually tracks most of this these days. You need to know how well your outreach is going, and how concise it is.
#2 – Information Tracking
Another consolidated analytic, this comes out of the outreach field, and is often handled by business intelligence and competitive intelligence software these days. This tracks mentions and proliferation over blogs and social media channels. This analytic shows how much information is out there for customers to use for research, how accurate it is, and when it’s third party sources, how kind the reviewers and bloggers are being. Customers need a good, linear source for research and comparison, so the more accurate and informative all this material is, the happier they are.
#3 – Repeat Customers
You want repeat customers, and this analytic is the big one for the next to last cycle of experience – use of a product or service. How this is obtained is done in a number of ways, mostly handled by CRM in digital sales (becoming the predominant channel for most things these days). This is a good indicator of how well your summary customer experience is going, because return customers are usually an indicator of positive experience overall. However, you can’t rely on this one solely because it doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement.
#4 – First Contact Resolution
Customer service and support is one of the bigger, and also more dangerous parts of the cycle. Everything else can go right, but the whole experience will crash if this one goes wrong in the end. This can’t be said for the other parts of the cycle mostly. The most important metric here is first contact resolution. A first contact resolution basically means that whatever issue or question a customer has is handled and closed the first time a customer initiates contact, be it through telephone, help desk or any other medium you choose to use. First contact resolutions are the holy grail of support, so you need to watch this one like a hawk.
There are a lot more customer experience analytics that do warrant attention, though. So while these are probably the biggest ones (and the most fatal if they go wrong), don’t just take this as the end all to knowing how to the state of your customer experience. Rather, take it as a starting point.