Investing to improve your business’s customer experience (CX)
can determine its success or failure. When companies take time to plan their CX,
it pays. In fact, according to Forrester
Research, there was $1.3 billion in additional revenue for companies
that improved CX. The ROI that comes from improved CX is related to increased
customer loyalty – each customer buys more, fewer customers are lost, and
customers are willing to spread good news about your business.
The benefits that come from improved CX depends on your
ability to measure your investments in CX, otherwise you won’t know which are
working. Measuring CX will cause your investments produce a return because they
generate new business, larger sales and even save money. When you start to
measure CX, you need to take a step back from traditional product-centric
measures of performance and focus on the basic functions of your business.
Image via blog.vitria.com
Everage
Insights shares four steps you need to take if you want to be able to
measure your CX.
Step 1 - Get into
Your Customer’s Brain
First, get to know your customer. This helps you set
aside your beliefs about your product and move towards understanding their
perspective. I’m sure you already know your customers - you have demographic
information on what they like to read. But many businesses still fail to
understand them.
Ask questions including:
- Since I know what they read, why do they choose to read those blog posts or ebooks?
- What problems are my customers trying to solve?
- What questions do they need answered?
- What kind of information did they need, but were unable to find?
- Are my customers and their behaviors changing?
Step 2 - Identify Points
of Contact
Measuring CX depends on identifying each point of contact
your customer has with your business. A touchpoint can occur virtually or in
the real world. Each contact your customers make with your product will
determine how long someone sticks around.
Touchpoint metrics are specific to CX - they are developed
to measure the attributes of each point of contact someone makes with your
brand and how they relate to your businesses goals. By monitoring how well you
meet customers’ expectations and how effectively you are achieving business
goals at each touchpoint, you will know if and how you are impressing
customers.
Step 3 - Develop Solutions
Now it’s time to develop solutions that can address these
problem areas. If you measure touchpoint metrics for customer or technical
support, you can theorize potential solutions to those problems. Until you
measure these ideas, they are only theories -possible solutions to the
problems plaguing your CX.
Step 4 - Measure Metrics
Solution metrics, qualitative and quantitative metrics that
measure the effectiveness of your solutions complement touchpoint metrics. Solution
metrics can narrow your focus to the problem areas identified with touchpoint
metrics. I ask myself one question: Are the problem areas improving or
worsening after I implemented my solution?
Using solution metrics, you can test your ideas to see which
effectively address the problems you identified and which fail to do so. Once
you know which solutions are effective, you’ll know where to focus your
business’s resources so you can see the biggest improvement in customer
experience.
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