The growth, development and profitability of any customer service company depends on its customers and it’s important to track this growth through customer experience measurement. Companies with many satisfied customers will undoubtedly be more prosperous than companies with few dissatisfied customers. A satisfied customer is one who is most likely to purchase from you, rarely shops around, refer other customers to your company and scores high when it comes to advocating for your company.
One of the most important ways to assess your business is to know your customer experience with your company. This can be measured although it may a little bit tricky. For many people, the difficulty comes in knowing where to start from and what they should be measured. The aim of this discussion is to provide businesses with customer experience measurement guide that solves the above difficulties.
The smartest way to measure the experience of your customers is to use a system that was developed by Professor Scott Smith who is a co-founder of the Qualtrics. It is important to know that your measurements will be based on the information you gathered from the behavior of your customers toward your business.
Your Customer Experience Measurement Guide
Measurement Parameters
The fundamental parameters for customer experience measurement include the following four:
- Perceived quality of service your business offers
- Attributional satisfaction
- Loyalty of the customers to your business
- Intentions of customers to repurchase
The above parameters can be inferred from your analysis of customer’s behavior and feedback. What this means is that you have to have a dependable way to manage customer experience. Below is a breakdown of the listed parameters.
Perceived quality of service your business offers
This is perhaps the most important measurement parameter. To know what customers think of the quality of service your business offers is to as the question- “Generally, how was your experience with the company?” There are two possible answers you will receive from this question. Some customers may tell you they regret having made the purchase (dissatisfied customers) while others may tell you it was a great choice and that they are glad they purchased it (satisfied customers).
It is difficult to go around asking this question as well as other relevant follow-up question; however, technological advancements has enabled to development of certain apps that can help you formulate the right questions, analyze the results and present it to you in manner that you can easily understand and use. Despite the app you use, knowing the perceived quality of service is vital in customer experience measurement.
Attributional Satisfaction
This is another important parameter that will enable you to measure your customers’ experience with your services. Here you use a single attribute of the product you are dealing in to know what informed their decision to purchase such a product. The question that will lead to this knowledge is “how important is feature X in your decision to purchase from ABC Company?” The answers to this question will give you a good idea of level of customer satisfaction.
I know you are asking yourself what attributes you can use to frame the question. Well, it is your responsibilities to define attributes that pertains to customer experience. Think of the strong points of your company including your core values and strategic plans. Other support questions you may ask to measure attributional satisfaction include the friendliness of the support staff, a feeling of being rushed or coerced, usefulness of the support content and whether the service exceeded the customers’ expectations or not.
Gathering such information may be very easy but analyzing the responses may quite difficult since the information may be extremely varied. The good news is that tools have been developed to make the work analysis and presentation of attributional satisfaction data easier. Just ensure you define the most relevant attributes.
Loyalty of the customers to your business
This is perhaps the simplest and the most straightforward parameter to measure in case of customer experience measurement. The question to ask is also straightforward-“would you recommend ABC Company to a friend or a colleague”. Answering in the affirmative is a mark of loyalty and therefore satisfaction. A negative answer means that the customer has no confidence in the company possible due to dissatisfaction.
This question of loyalty is the foundation of the so called Net Promoter Score (NPS) which is vital metric invented by Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company. The score aims to give a snapshot of a company’s performances through the eyes of its customers. This score highly correlates with the likelihood of customers continuing to purchase or use services from a particular company. This makes it an extremely important metric.
Intentions of customers to repurchase
Last but not least is the intention of customers to repurchase from you. Definitely, only a satisfied customer will return to purchase another product or renew as subscription when it expires. The question to ask in this case is “Do you intend to repurchase from ABC Company when your subscription runs out?” Any company that intends to grow and expand would hope for the answer to be in the affirmative.
Customers who have purchased from you once may be attracted to repurchase because of the experience they had during the buying process or the quality of the product or service they received. Simply put, the post purchase process can influence the intention to purchase and this would give you a good idea of whether your customers are satisfied with the company. This means you have to carry out thorough post-purchase follow-up. It requires need record keeping to know the whereabouts of your customers and what they are up to.
Summary
From the above discussion, I am certain you will be able to measure customer experience so that you can make the necessary improvements to further your company. You also need to take care of customer experience metrics including response time, customer satisfaction with each interaction, contact resolution rates, hold time and abandonment rates as well as many more. This may be a complex process and so you may need to seek the services of an expert. If you think your customers are not getting satisfied with the services you offer them, then you must conduct customer experience measurement.
