It is common knowledge that when people feel heard by a brand, they remember the experience for a long time. The key to high customer retention and brand advocacy lies in the way companies conduct CX monitoring. Brands that go the extra mile to enhance their CX protocols will stay strong in a competitive market.
What is Customer Experience Monitoring?
The main question is – are we actually listening to customer’s conversations over online platforms and survey feedback? Proactive monitoring involves keeping a track of usage patterns, user analytics, online activity over websites and mobile applications, resolutions of support tickets.
Customer experience monitoring is a comprehensive yet systematic process of tracing every interaction of a customer with your brands. Brands analyze these interactions at multi channel touchpoints. This includes their first interaction till post-purchase support. This also makes for a vivid yet long customer journey reaching every channel of interaction with the brand.
Is customer experience monitoring the same as digital experience management?
Customer Experience Monitoring (CEM) focuses on tracking and analyzing customer interactions across various touchpoints to enhance their overall experience. It involves monitoring not just digital interactions but also encompasses physical touchpoints (in-store experiences and customer service interactions.)
On the other hand, Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) specifically targets the online aspects of customer interactions such as website visits, app usage, social media engagement, and more. While CEM is broader in scope, DEM is more focused on the digital realm.
Both CEM and DEM are an ongoing process and play a crucial role in improving the overall customer journey. These terms are often interchangeably used.
Why is Customer Experience Monitoring Necessary?
Business growth depends on how critically every stakeholder captures customer interactions on a daily basis. Here are some prime reasons why it is crucial for marketing professionals to monitor the overall CX periodically:
1. Maintain competitive advantage:
Let’s face it. Unhappy people usually switch brands out of prolonged neglect from their favourite brands. This means loss of business. Tracking satisfaction metrics mean capturing complaints, support-ticket generation, closing feedback loops and providing people with human interactions to solve issues. A study by PWC shows that 73% of consumers will mark customer experience as a major influencing factor for purchase. While McKinsey found that companies with high customer satisfaction scores outperform their competitors by 20 percent in revenue growth.
2. Maintain customer-centric approach:
A popular shoe brand Zappos assisted their customer for 10 hours 53 minutes over a phone call!
While this may be an extreme example, customers are the heart of any business. While creating products and services, keep in mind the end-user. This includes ad campaigns, marketing efforts, content language, brand presentation and channels where your user base might utilize the most. This also includes support team complaint resolution as a post purchase practice. Everything put together can boost your competitive edge in a dynamic market.
3. Upkeep of brand’s online reputation:
In today’s digital landscape, it can get harder to track negative reviews over social media platforms. However, CX monitoring includes tracking of negative responses over feedback surveys, website testimonials, bad reviews on Google and other third party review sites. A positive customer experience can bring new consumers and turn detractors to brand advocates with impromptu assistance and a better support experience. This also includes online word-of-mouth reputation among peers and similar customer personas.
4. Maintain data-driven marketing with minimal churn:
Actionable insights require data-driven customer experience metrics. Information equips the modern day marketer to trace and analyze every customer interaction, their satisfaction levels, health scores and segregate the detractors from promoters. Data also includes a consumer’s sentiment scores, their emotional investment in a brand, their response on a customer feedback survey and responses over net promoter score metrics. This can detect early churn risk at various touchpoints. Using data, you can prevent people from switching over to your competitors.
5. Product and service upgrades for constant improvement:
People want upgrades. People become brand advocates when a company takes feedback seriously. This helps bands upgrade their CX protocols, improve their products and manage customer expectations. While the market is a dynamic place, people’s preferences and behaviour keep changing. By welcoming continuous improvements, organisations can stay versatile, flexible and agile and improve the overall customer experience.
Common Customer Experience Metrics To Monitor:
CX teams use a combination of metrics to map consumer interactions at various touchpoints, understand their buying intent, address issues and improve customer service. Here are some commonly used CX metrics that you can map on your dashboard.
Net promoter score (NPS):
The net promoter score is an industry standard of identifying satisfaction scores. Here people are segregated under detractors, passives and promoters. The customer perception is measured with just one question- “How likely are you to recommend the brand’s products and services to your friends/family?”.
Detractors are unhappy customers whose scores fall between 0-6. They have the potential to share negative reviews and tarnish brand image.
Passives are people who are indifferent to a brand’s products and services. They score between 7-8. Passives have a chance of becoming brand advocates with proper attention.
Promoters are happy customers who score above 8-10. Promoters are brand loyal and are enthusiastic about the brand’s products and services (Example Apple users globally are enthusiastic about every Apple product launch).
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT):
CSAT scores can be used more frequently via feedback surveys. Here people can rate their satisfaction metrics from a 5 point scale or a 10 point scale. The survey questions ask if people are happy with certain goods and services. CSAT score surveys can be shared over any touchpoint even if the interaction with a potential customer was short lived. Companies then calculate the average percentage of all the survey responses.
Customer effort score (CES):
The CES metric will measure the level of difficulty a customer might have had with a service representative or the brand’s products and services. CES surveys can be shared immediately after problem resolution or a phone call or chat assistance with a service executive.
Churn rate:
Acquiring a new customer is harder and costlier than serving the existing user base. Churn rate will detect if any user from the current customer base is looking to switch to a competitor or will renew their subscription with the brand. Churn rate gives a comprehensive understanding of a customer’s satisfaction levels, their interactions with the brand, sentiment analysis and map their feedback and testimonials at touchpoints. Churn rate, in simple terms, is the percentage of customers who do not renew or cancel their subscriptions with the company over a time period.
Retention rate:
Retention rate metric considers consumers with a positive brand impression who are likely to be brand loyal over time. This calculates the percentage of customers a company has retained over a duration of time. This metric takes into account customer engagement, brand loyalty and sentiment analysis.
Customer retention rate = ((number of customers @ end of period – number of new customers within that period) / number of customers at start of period) x 100
Customer lifetime value:
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) measures the total revenue a business can expect to generate from a customer over their lifetime. By understanding CLV, businesses can allocate resources more effectively, focus on acquiring and retaining valuable patrons and optimize customer relationship management (CRM) strategies. By focusing on increasing CLV, businesses can improve user satisfaction, loyalty, and overall profitability.
Customer lifetime value = average order value x purchase frequency rate x average customer lifetime.
Importance of A Robust CX Dashboard for Customer Experience Monitoring
A robust CEM dashboard can enhance the user experience among marketing and sales departments in collaboration with important stakeholders. Here is why a modern day marketing profession might need this to supercharge growth:
- Real time data tracking is the need of the hour: In a dynamic digital landscape, people constantly share their feedback and reviews over the internet . You can capture people’s candid responses using feedback surveys and satisfaction metrics. Real time data will empower support teams to close feedback loop, avoid negative reviews and convert detractors to promoters.
- Collecting data from diverse touchpoints: Touchpoints include website chatbots, chat agents, social media channel integrations, email surveys, messenger app surveys and satisfaction feedback forms. All data compiled can be visible over the dashboard for a comprehensive view.
- Faster data analysis to save time: Without manual intervention, a smart dashboard will analyze and compile complex data for all decision makers. A smart dashboard will save time, help you pinpoint high friction zones and view trends and patterns over a time period.
- Using AI to simplify work flows: Use artificial intelligence to create faster customer feedback surveys. Conduct data analysis using AI. This brings quick visualization over dashboards.
Conclusion
Customer experience monitoring done over the Merren CX dashboard can showcase critical metrics. This includes a user’s emotional metrics, map the user journey across touchpoints, pain points and uncover market behaviour and preferences. Note that CEM is not a one-off activity. It requires constant attention to details along with tools that can automate this experience for faster workflows among departments. Explore tools provided by Merren and supercharge your CX protocols at the earliest.
