CX Success, How Do You Measure Customer Success?

Success is something to be celebrated. It gives you validation of the hard work you’ve put into a project or task. In the world of customer experiences, success is where as a business you have provided satisfaction and left a lasting positive impression on your customers. It goes beyond the mere feat of receiving a sale for a product or service to increase revenue, in fact, it can be worth so much more in terms of reputation and growth.

Customer experience success can be many things meaning it can be measured in different ways to benefit your future CX. So, how do you measure customer success and what can organisations do to ensure they understand why and how this is important for their long-term success?

Customer success and customer experience – working together

All companies want happy, satisfied customers, but keeping this consistent is a challenge. Knowing your customers inside and out ensures you know what makes them tick, what they like and what they don’t, so personalising experiences for them and measuring this is key. Getting the customer experience in line with their expectations and beyond will put you on the right track to customer success. However, as many as 37% of companies do not have a clearly defined customer success strategy, which leaves the question, how are they measuring CX effectively? As you can guess, with difficulty.

Without measuring CX success, improving the customer experience is an uphill struggle. The need for feedback and a way to understand customer experience metrics is essential, otherwise, it’s a whole world of guesswork which doesn’t help your customers or your company. It’s no surprise that 72% of businesses treat customer success as their number one priority, so how are they ensuring they can meet this need - it’s all down to the metrics and tools they use to make measuring CX a breeze.

Measuring CX with the right customer experience metrics

Whilst you can see repeated business from customers as success alone, this doesn’t tell companies the full story, similar to when customers do not return. Both situations leave you wanting to understand why. Using customer experience metrics can provide the context you seek to make sense of customer decisions. You may think you’ve got your CX defined and well-planned, but ongoing feedback and quantitative results can provide specific and valuable information on where things are going well and what needs to change and improve.

CSAT & NPS – focusing on feedback is simple when using Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) to measure success, and 63% of companies use NPS for this reason. Calculating your NPS is effective to measure CX success because it comes directly from your customers. Providing them with a platform to give feedback simply and quickly, NPS is a benchmark all companies should look to implement that uses an easy survey format for customers to rank a service or experience and provide specific feedback if they want to.

As a company, you can then follow up and interact with promoters and detractors to fully understand why they scored you the way they did. It can also be useful to then provide this feedback to employees to celebrate successes and work on improvements. Both CSAT and NPS are similar, but NPS will provide a longer-term look at the relationship between your brand and your customer, whereas CSAT is a form of transactional feedback for short-term, immediate feedback.

CLV – Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) can be particularly helpful to understand the long-term relationships you have with your customers. The focus here is on building relationships that last so that you have advocates for your brand who will continue to use your products or services in the long term. The value of keeping customers longer cannot be understated and is no real surprise; if you can grow your customer base whilst also having brand loyalty, you have a winning combination.

Churn Rate – understanding the number of customers that either never return after one transaction, or suddenly leave after many, can help to identify patterns. There could be something about your current CX that is causing this, so calculating the churn rate can see how well you are doing to create brand loyalty. Usually, the lower your churn rate, the more advocates you will have and more loyalty. You can then track this and determine if churn is increasing or decreasing, and use this alongside other CX success metrics.

CES – how much effort did your customers have to put in to achieve what they wanted to? Using Customer Effort Score (CES) is an ideal way to find out. If the UX makes it too difficult to help customers, this will be reflected in a poor CX overall, leading to negative CES. It simply asks customers to rank from very difficult to very easy, or strongly disagree to strongly agree, how well things went. This then provides very clear feedback if you are achieving customer experience success or not.

EX – the one area that may get neglected by some companies when it comes to customer success is the employee experience (EX). If an organisation is struggling to motivate and engage its employees, this will start to impact CX, and not in a successful way. As many as 71% of company executives identify EX as critical to their company’s success, so working to ensure your employees are satisfied as well as your customers is a tandem effort. Part of successful EX is to integrate some of the metrics mentioned above, providing valuable NPS and CSAT feedback to help shape training and share not only the negatives but the positives.

What does CX success look like for your business?

According to a CS study, 38% of companies do not have a Customer Success tool to measure CX, leaving a huge amount of organisations without the means to tell if they are really on the right track. With various different ways to capture data and information to help improve both EX and CX, brands will start to notice the difference. The important aspect is to start measuring success if you are not already in the habit of doing so. Whilst to some the data may be overwhelming and difficult to process at first sight, getting into the routine of actively working on customer success all starts with being able to measure it, and this is almost impossible without the data. It is one of the reasons why a growing number of businesses have even created job roles around customer success, highlighting how detailed and vital this is for an organisation’s future success.

• Survey regularly – work on a strategy to send out and gather completed surveys

• Measure the entire journey – from start to finish, ask questions around each stage to leave no stone unturned on your mission to customer success

• Check all feedback, positive and negative – cherry-picking positive feedback will only tell one part of the story, so engage with all feedback and act on all to avoid missed opportunities to create advocates.

• Don’t neglect the employee experience – never put your employees in the corner; put them front and centre in your goal for better CX and customer success.

• Act swiftly – do it today!

At Ventrica, we know that brands want to ensure they can maintain their high standards for CX and continue to deliver customer success in the future. We provide assistance to help them achieve this, with services that can strengthen customer relationships and provide solutions that go above beyond their expectations.

With a focus on omnichannel and helping you meet customer demand, we can help you on your journey to a successful customer experience, providing CX consultation as well as BPO solutions. To see how your brand can improve many metrics toward customer success, contact us today.