Customers may have hundreds of interactions with your company over the course of your relationship, where each one represents an individual data point on how they feel about your products, services, and more. Measuring these data points over a customer’s life cycle is challenging by itself. It becomes exponentially more complex when you scale it across the hundreds, thousands—or more—people who make up your customer base.
Yet this holistic understanding of how your customers feel about your organization defines customer experience (CX) and is key to driving loyalty, growth, and revenue for companies around the world. Customer experience is how customers perceive your organization as a result of all the contact they have with your team and your products—from when your relationship starts to when they stop working with you.
Measuring and tracking customer experience is essential to helping your organization achieve success, but doing so requires a thoughtful process. You’ll need to collect the right types of feedback and analyze them comprehensively, quickly, and collaboratively.
We’ll show you how, and we’ll provide the resources you need to start measuring customer experience. To start, we’ll talk about why CX is so important, but if you’re eager to skip ahead to a specific section, you can click-through the following table of contents!
There’s a seemingly endless number of statistics that validate the importance of CX. For example:
Unfortunately, organizations by and large fail to live up to customer’s standards. According to research by Bain & Company, 4 out of 5 CEOs think they provide customers with superior experiences, but only 8% of those customers agree.
To give clients what they’re looking for, you have to get systematic. You’ll need to continuously collect feedback from every customer, analyze their responses, and share them out across the team so they can take action.
Let’s begin our step-by-step walkthrough of this framework by reviewing the different ways you can assess customer sentiment.
To measure customer experience successfully, you’ll need to be thoughtful about how you collect feedback as well as what you ask. There are several ways that companies measure customer experience, each with their own set of pros and cons.
1. Run customer surveys. Surveys are probably the most common method for measuring customer experience, and it’s not hard to see why. Since you can use one questionnaire to gather thousands of responses, you can make short work of measuring even the largest groups of customers.