3 Most Common CX Metrics Questions (And Their Answers)
Customer experience (CX) metrics are a CX program’s bread and butter. NPS, CSAT, and CES have historically been the main tools every program utilizes to have a systematic way of establishing a voice of customer (VoC) source and leveraging those findings to improve customer experiences. But it’s not easy—a CX metric score alone can’t create transformation.
CX metrics aren’t one-size-fits-all. Certain CX metrics are more fitting for specific industries—and even then your brand might not need to use the same metrics as your direct competitors. Case in point, there’s no one golden method to measuring CX metrics, which is actually why many businesses struggle to create a success framework.
In our decades of experience helping brands to build programs (and the success frameworks that accompany them), we’ve noticed there are a few common obstacles companies face. Here are the three most common CX questions we get all the time:
CX Metrics Question #1: What Metrics Can You Use to Determine Industry and Organizational Maturity?
Before you can answer this question for your company, there are three things you should answer first:
- Are you measuring a customer experience—and is it satisfaction or NPS—or a metric that aligns with the goal you have?
- What are you doing with it? How are the metrics of field services, retail, call-center, first-contact resolution, etc. used?
- From an employee perspective, are you doing something beyond a basic employee engagement study? Or do you have an employee pulse metric by division, region, or queue?
There’s no one-size-fits-all metric that determines maturity—and should there be? Instead, you need to focus on where your company is on the journey toward your specific goals. Success, then, is determined by how close you are to achieving that goal, instead of a set of objective metrics that may not even relate to your business. Truly mature organizations are aligned on specific business goals and have metrics directly attached to those individual goals. They frequently check in on those metrics and take action to move the needle and tie that success back to their experience programs.
CX Metrics Question #2: How Can You Tie Metrics Directly to CX and VoC Programs Versus Other Internal and External Factors?
The important thing is to look at your organization and how they talk about success—and learning to speak that language. Are you a finance, operations, or retention-focused organization? And how are you integrating operational, technical, and financial data with customer survey data?
Organizations that are technically or engineering focused often look for an extreme amount of precision. But survey data doesn’t always lead to one answer—or the answer you expect. The real question is, “how do you pull information together and communicate that collectively?” As much as the mathematical connections are crucial, so are the practical ones.
Ultimately, metrics can be tied either statistically or practically, but the latter is much more realistic for a business. For example, the broader benefits when enabling an entire organization is hard to quantify but there could be specific benefits your program has contributed to make a project more successful. Maybe the insights your program provided can take accountability for 10% of the project’s effects. Then you can say, “it wasn’t all from our VoC or CX program but we get credit for that 10%.”
Want to learn about the 4 areas where we see CX practitioners tie their efforts to the bottom line most successfully? Check out this infographic!
CX Metrics Question #3: When It Comes to Survey Analysis, What’s the Best Practice to Analyze Which Attributes Are Affecting NPS?
Let’s say your organization leadership is focusing in on NPS—where you are, what drives it, and so on. So, you try structural equation modeling, key driver analysis, or heavy duty analytics. That approach is equatable to killing a mosquito with a sledgehammer. Instead, you want to break methodology down to core factors—using statistical analysis or text analytics—to see what themes come out and categorize them according to where your organization is.
Now, at an executive level, you might not want to communicate the “R-squared” of the modeling. Usually, executives just want answers to the questions, “what’s driving NPS?” and “what should I do with it?” Your job is to articulate the answers in a clear and simple way throughout the organization. That will drive your success from the top down. But of course, you should still have in-depth analyses prepared in your back pocket if you encounter someone who is statistically oriented.
Wrapping Things Up
You probably still have a bunch of questions of your own. Like, “what are the best practices to make sure you’re appropriately capturing feedback across the customer journey?” Or, “how do you focus on the experiences that make the biggest impact to the bottomline?”
If you’re looking for more resources and insight into CX metrics and ensuring your CX program delivers business value (ROI) to your organization, watch this webinar with third-party analyst firm, Forrester, to learn the answers.
