Are your customers successful and happy with your products and services? Are they telling their friends and business partners to buy from you? If they have a concern, are you making meaningful change to address it? These are questions that all businesses need to ask themselves to ensure everything is being done to create customer delight. Happy customers are not only retained but they also help create more happy customers. Having solid answers to these questions helps drive a smooth customer experience throughout your sales cycle, the delivery, use or implementation of your product, and through any ongoing post-sale interactions.
To realize these goals a company needs to ensure their practices delight customers at every stage. And as the saying goes: “You cannot change what you cannot measure”.
Measuring and Acting
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” -Bill Gates
When companies sell a product or service, they are selling the value that it provides and the experiences the buyer has with it. Not only must your product perform as expected, but the customer must realize value through a positive experience both with the product itself and through all points of contact with your business. Achieving these outcomes is not immediately intuitive. Therefore companies need metrics to understand what success means.
Often, departments within a business focus on a few key performance indicators to help judge how they are doing. Ultimately, each department’s metrics are essential to their roles, however, the customer’s success is the responsibility of the business as a whole, not one specific team. For example, a sales department may focus on a revenue metric to show success; if sales targets are met or growing, then business is going well. However, this metric focuses solely on your sales team’s outcomes and does not adequately factor in customer outcomes. Over time, if existing customers are not successful, sales growth will stall. Repeat business and word-of-mouth promotion by delighted customers are vital to the long-term success of a business.
Another crucial touchpoint is when a concern or problem arises through a customer service or success team. No business wants their product or process to break down or otherwise not meet their customers’ expectations. But, inevitably when the unexpected occurs, there must be a process through which to understand the problem and do something with that information. The only thing worse than not collecting customer feedback is not actioning it when you do. Listening to and engaging with the voice of the customer is vital to a business’ ability to help customers be successful. Driving a positive experience, even when things go wrong, helps improve the loyalty and satisfaction of your customers.
Measuring these various metrics with multiple tools, or between separated departments leads to a lack of focus on the touchpoints that need improvement and to a weak feedback loop through the organization. Capturing feedback at each step of the customer journey and aggregating that data to build a view into how delighted customers are, helps to make solid data-driven decisions on where to improve the customer experience.
Customer Experience Metrics
“The key is when a customer walks away, thinking ‘Wow, I love doing business with them, and I want to tell others about the experience.’” -Shep Hyken
Customer Experience is a differentiator. PwC found that “73% [of buyers] point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions.” It is imperative to ensure the customer experience is measured accurately. Within customer experience, there are 2 measures typically used by companies. Briefly, these are:
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score is a measure of customer loyalty to a company. It is measured by asking the question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product to your friends and colleagues?”. Once the data is collected, the score is formed by subtracting the percentage of promoters (9 and 10 ratings) from the percentage of detractors (0-6 ratings).
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
CSAT is about meeting expectations and usually revolves around one element of the customer experience. eg. “Are you happy with the product?” or “Was your support ticket solved quickly?”. It is usually a Yes/No or 5-point scale and is presented as an average of all responses.
Customer Delight Score
Customer Delight Score is a superset of these and other departmental metrics which helps your business understand what is going right and what needs change. Customer Delight goes beyond satisfaction and loyalty as individual ratings and helps focus on the reasons that lead to them. By combining a holistic view of a given customer’s NPS, CSAT and other sentiments throughout your customer journey, your business can track actions against real customer concerns at all touchpoints and consistently delight customers with the value and experiences they want.
Why Measure Customer Delight?
“Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create raving fans.” -Ken Blanchard
Delighted customers are created by going above and beyond the expectations and making them feel special. This feeling is achieved by finding out the motivation behind your customer’s survey answers and learning what they want from your business at each step of your customer journey. Customer Delight Score is a metric that helps your business know if you are genuinely making customers happy. It is calculated by measuring your customer sentiment at touchpoints, including NPS and CSAT surveys, support channels, sales process and any other milestones. Using a Customer Experience Management Platform, you can combine and track actionable customer feedback effectively to deliver better experiences.
Surveying customers at various times during the customer journey helps your business gain valuable insight by comparing written and numerical feedback with sentiment analysis tied to a specific interaction and customer. With this data, you can drill down to learn what meaningful steps are necessary within your business to improve your product, service or process, with a goal to increase retention, and delight more customers more frequently. Using Customer Delight Score will help you listen to and action your customers’ concerns and will create successful experiences, more value and lead to longer-term loyalty, higher retention and increased word-of-mouth advertising.
“Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered service marks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld“
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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