Today’s customers are driven by experiences. The customer experience as Forrester Research defines it is “how customers perceive their interactions with your company”. Indeed, perception and interaction are the two pillars of a customer experience definition – and a good customer experience often leads to customer Satisfaction, the Grail every company looks for. Customer satisfaction evaluates how the products or services supplied by a company meet or surpass a customer’s expectation.

Brands and businesses who want to retain their customers and increase loyalty must provide personalized, responsive, seamless experiences across all channels.  Part of creating a positive customer experience is understanding where your business is doing well, and which areas need more attention or improvement. For customer service industries, utilizing the Customer Effort Score and the Net Promoter Score can help you meet customers’ needs, avert potential customer frustrations, monitor customer satisfaction levels, and get an idea of how your team is doing. Let’s delve into these notions to see how to measure customer satisfaction and drive up your customers’ experience.

Forrester states that 72% of businesses believe that improving the customer experience is their top priority.

Businesses need analytics-driven insights about their team performance and customer happiness levels in order to determine their own strengths and weaknesses that are affecting overall business objectives. Popular customer service KPIs like the Customer Effort Score (CES) and  Net Promoter Score (NPS) effectively measures a customer’s quality and ease of experience with a particular business.

Determining accurate CES and NPS is easier when you are using an interactive, real-time dashboard that’s capable of providing elevated visualizations along with concise textual details. Let’s delve a little deeper into these two customer satisfaction metrics.

How To Measure Customer Satisfaction And Customer Experience Efficiently?

The Customer Effort Score and the Net Promoter Score are two of the most important customer metrics. Both are crucial to a business’s long-term success. If you don’t have your finger on the pulse of customer sentiment, then you are missing out on an important opportunity to maintain the loyalty of existing customers and successfully reach new ones.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS can be particularly useful for driving diverse success initiatives, such as segmenting customers into distinct categories to better tailor marketing experiences towards them. NPS also correlates with profits or growth, so insights can help executives, investors, board members, marketing teams address any issue or solve any problem based on customer satisfaction insights.

This metric is all about referrals. If your customers are happy with the experience, then they are likely to refer your business’s products and services to someone they know. The NPS metric lets businesses understand how well they are doing in terms of both customer promotions and customer loyalty. Essentially, NPS is a metric for customer loyalty. How to measure the NPS:

• Following purchases and interactions with your business’s customer service, companies can ask how likely their customer is to recommend their business to someone they know. The score is determined by the percentage of promoters minus your percentage of detractors.

To know who is a promoter and who is a detractor, you apply this scale to the results you get after asking the question “on a scale from 1 to 10, how likely would you recommend our services/products to a friend?”:

Source: cx management

We hence see that from 0 to 6, we have “detractors”, which is a lot more than “promoters”, who need to give a grade between 9 and 10. Passive are comprised between 7 and 8.

• NPS ranges start at -100 which means that everyone is a detractor, all the way up to +100 which means that everyone is a promoter. Many businesses consider an NPS of over +50 to be excellent, but it highly depends on your industry: Temkin Group performed a benchmark and came up with this chart to represent the range of NPS in different industries:

**click to enlarge**

We see that an NPS of 10 or 11 is considered good for the telecommunication services while it would be a disaster for an investment firm.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES is a great way for companies to discover any potential bottlenecks in the customer experience. It’s also a strong predictor of future purchase behavior and the insights obtained are most often highly actionable.

This metric is all about figuring out how fast and simple customers find their interaction with your business. Busy customers consider ease-of-experience as a reflection of a business and a direct correlation between their satisfaction and loyalty.

When to use the CES:

• Following a specific customer service touchpoint, such as after an email-based support ticket has been resolved.
• After customer consultations or meetings, online checkouts and purchases, visits to your website, and any interaction with your business’s customer service whether its live chat, social media, in person, or on the phone.

Businesses can measure the CES in a few different ways:

• Sometimes a scale range is used, with 1 indicating a low-level effort and 10 indicating a high-level effort. A question is usually incorporated that asks the customer to rate how they agree or disagree with a statement. An example of this is: “please rate how much you agree with the following statement: it was easy for me to get my issue resolved today”, with 1 being “strongly agree” and 10 “strongly disagree”.
  .
• Obtaining an average score: This simplistic approach just requires you to get an average of all the scores to calculate a mark out of 10. Therefore, Customer Effort Score = Total sum of scores divided by number of scores.
  .
• NPS style calculation: The CES is complementary to the NPS, and businesses can use a NPS style measurement for calculating CES. Therefore, Customer Effort Score =  % high level effort – % low level effort.
  You hence need to determine what is a high and a low level effort: on our example above with a scale from 1 to 10, low-level effort are customers who scored either a 1 or 2, medium-level effort are those who scored from 3 to 5 and high-level effort are customers who scored from 6 to 10. You can use another scale often utilized by businesses, from 1 to 7, and determine the high or low effort accordingly.

There are different types of effort that can be included in the measure of the Customer Effort Score: a financial effort (shipment costs), communication effort (no answer to emails or phone calls), wait time effort (shipment took up to a month, or I was put on hold for 8 minutes), physical effort (package delivery was far from my place), process effort (repeated contact details to fill in), etc.

A Better Understanding of The Customer Experience With CES And NPS

Obtaining frequent feedback in the form of these customer satisfaction metrics can help organizations develop a more data driven decision making regarding their promotional content, marketing techniques, and customer experience efforts. You can enhance your studies and benchmark thanks to a professional market research analytics software, helping you gathering and visualizing your data in a meaningful way. Additionally, it helps businesses effectively evaluate and measure progress.

Where do common customer frustrations originate?

Having an idea of where a lot of common frustrating customer experiences occur can inform strategies to correct these frustrations and guide you towards the right customer experience metrics. Interactions with customer service representatives and roadblocks that arise when engaging with a business on multiple channels are a significant area of customer dissatisfaction. An Accenture study found that 89% of customers get frustrated because they need to repeat their problems and issues to numerous representatives.

Customers become quickly frustrated and are more likely to sever ties with a business or brand when the following events occur:

• When a customer has to switch from an online channel to the phone.
• When a customer is transferred to a different representative or department to resolve an issue.
• When a customer has to continuously or repeatedly contact a business about the same problem.
• When a customer has to re-explain an issue or problem.

What these facts indicate is that a customer’s frustration corresponds to the amount of time and effort they have to apply towards interacting with your business in a dissatisfying or unfulfilling way. This is yet another example of why it is so crucial to use  customer satisfaction measurements like CES and NPS to know whether or not your customers are happy and engaged with your business in a positive way.

Pros and Cons of using CES and NPS to evaluate satisfaction

There are numerous upsides and a few downsides to using the CES and NPS to determine customer satisfaction.

Pros of Using CES

• The CES enables you to forecast common follow up questions that customers frequently ask customer service teams so that your customer service representatives can lower call back rates and case reopen rates.
• CES is great for looking at specific customer touch points so you can find out how exactly they went about resolving their issue and how long it took for them to find a way to address it.  
• CES can be used for both customer success teams and product teams because both user experience and user interface depend on the ease of use and it can identify points where customers begin to feel frustrated.

Cons of Using CES:

• The CES doesn’t provide exact reasons why efforts are either high or low.
• The CES doesn’t take into account how customers might be influenced by your competitors and by product prices.

Pros of Using NPS:

• NPS is a quick way to evaluate customer sentiment about your business and provides baseline metrics to measure if customers are feeling positive or negative about your company over a certain period of time.
• NPS helps businesses identify customers who recommend their brand.
• Fairly simple survey that provides valuable, expansive insight.  
• Helps businesses make improvements in critical areas and focus on what causes your businesses promoters to give you high numbers and vice versa, regarding your detractors.

Cons of Using NPS:

• NPS cannot stand on its own and requires a qualitative analysis of the feedback.
• NPS may reveal information in which customer responses don’t exactly align with actual customer behavior.

The impact of CES and NPS on business success

A bad CES can negatively impact your business’s long-term success given that these numbers indicate a loss of customer loyalty. If your customers are not having an easy experience interacting with your brand, or are not receiving a quick resolution to their concerns, or are not likely to recommend your product or services, then this means that your business is failing to provide a compelling experience.

According to NewVoiceMedia, American businesses lose $62 billion each year because of bad customer experiences. Considering the nature of online interactions in an increasingly digital world, customers have the ability to spread their opinions, both negative and positive, so it’s absolutely essential for you to provide your customers with something positive and delightful to say.

Customer Satisfaction Metrics Dashboards

Using a business dashboard for your customer service management practices enables your business to easily understand all of your customer data real-time with advanced predictive capabilities. With well-defined, organized visuals, your business is capable of evaluating a wide variety of customer experience metrics and KPIs.

**click to enlarge**

Customer Satisfaction Dashboard

Net Promoter Score (NPS): As we saw, this metric lets you evaluate how well you are doing regarding customer referrals and determines how and where you can improve your services. 

Customer Effort Score (CES): As we said, this metric provides valuable feedback on the customer experience and your ability to provide user-friendly interactions with your website, technology, and overall business. KPIs linked to satisfied customers also are to a corresponding business growth, so it’s important to lower this number as much as possible.

Customer retention: This metric measures the quantity of customers that are returning for repeat business and purchases. A growing retention rate is what you should aim for, especially when we know that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing one.

Customer satisfaction on overall: provides insights about what your clients think about your business, and measures how they feel about your overall brand, products, and services. Basically, the higher, the better.

Benefit From Your Customer Satisfaction Metrics

Omni-channel customer experiences are continuing to grow, and businesses need the comprehensive data to understand how easily, quickly, and responsively their customers are able to interact with and experience their brand.

Companies can accurately calculate their Customer Effort Score and Net Promoter Score, and apply the insights toward the evolution of their business, whether it’s resolving customer issues more quickly, or improving support agent productivity.

Mitigating customer churn and frustrations should be the goal of any business, particularly those in customer-driven industries. An online dashboard tool like datapine’s provide organizations with the means to track and visualize their critical customer service data in multidimensional and efficient way. See by yourself and start your 14-day free trial today!

The post How To Measure Customer Satisfaction With The Customer Effort Score And The Net Promoter Score appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.