IDC predicts that global spending on customer experience (CX) technologies will reach $641 billion in 2022, and 95 % of senior marketing executives in leading companies believe that CX roles within their organizations are the most strategically important for growth, according to eConsultancy.
It is clear that customer experience is top of mind for organizations today, and rightly so. Customers hold the power to make or break brands, and providing a positive customer experience is a key differentiator for competitive advantage.
Table of Contents
Customer Experience Analytics Definition
What’s the power of CX?
Customer Experience Metrics & KPIs
Measuring Customer Experience Requires a Holistic View
Social Listening Gains Importance for CX Measurement
Going Beyond Simple Social Listening for Deeper CX Insights
Leverage Meltwater Consumer Intelligence for Customer Experience Analytics
Get Turnkey, Comprehensive Customer Experience Measurement
Customer Experience Analytics Definition
We define customer experience analytics as the process of measuring, analyzing, and improving the customer experience.
This process involves collecting data about how customers interact with a company, analyzing that data to identify patterns and cx trends, and using those insights to improve the customer experience.
Customer experience analytics can help companies improve their customer service, design better products, and create more effective marketing campaigns. By understanding how customers interact with a company, businesses can make changes that lead to better customer satisfaction and loyalty.
What’s the power of CX?
A positive customer experience (and the right customer data) can:
- Promote customer loyalty
- Expand customer engagement
- Improve customer retention
- Encourage brand advocacy
- Increase customer lifetime value
- Improve crisis management
Considering the importance of customer experience, brands put much effort into building a strong CX strategy that includes every possible touchpoint. That process starts with developing a clear picture of the quality of the customer experience the brand is already providing.
The question is, do you know how your customers really feel about their experiences with your brand? If not, how can you find out?
Let’s dive deeper.
Customer Experience Metrics & KPIs
For many years, brands have measured customer experience with a few key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. Combined, these metrics offer powerful insights to help brands improve their products and services as well as the overall customer experience.
When done well, a customer experience strategy can:
- Increase customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Improve your customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
- Provide better customer support
- Increase your conversion rate
- Contribute to business outcomes
- Influence customer behavior
- Improve customer interactions
- Reduce drop-off rates
- Identify high-value customers or accounts
- Increase the number of loyal customers
- Find ways to cross-sell or upsell
Deciding how to measure customer experience starts with choosing the right customer experience KPIs. You'll use these metrics and KPIs for benchmarking customer experience, setting big-picture goals, and seeing how your customer journey analytics improve over time. Some examples include:
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS (sometimes called Promoter Score) tracks how likely a customer is to recommend a brand to their family and friends on a scale of one to 10. This quantitative measure is typically divided into three categories: detractors (1-7), neutrals (8), and promoters (9-10). The higher the score, the more likely it is that your customers will be loyal to your brand.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES measures how much effort a customer must expend to reach their goal with a brand interaction. The idea is that the higher the effort required, the lower customer loyalty will be. Brands typically calculate their CES scores by sending post-engagement surveys asking customers to rate their interactions.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
CSAT measures how happy customers are with a brand interaction or an overall brand experience. CSAT surveys are usually sent after a specific interaction with your company, such as having a support ticket resolved or making a purchase.
Customer Churn
Churn rate is a customer experience measurement that shows how quickly customers leave your company or no longer pay for your services. Since it’s more expensive to find new customers than retain existing ones, brands need to pay attention to attrition rates to retain customers for the long term.
Using churn rate, you can examine patterns in how customers are leaving your company. If it’s due to a product or service update, pricing change, or alteration to the customer experience, you can dig deeper into your data to learn more.
A similar customer experience measurement is the retention rate, which shows the percentage of customers you retain.
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
When customers experience an issue, they expect you to resolve it. The faster, the better — treating each issue with urgency can score you mega points in the eyes of your customers.
First Contact Resolution refers to the number of issues, questions, or needs that are resolved with a single point of contact. For example, if a customer calls your help desk, someone can resolve the issue on that one phone call.
You can calculate this metric by dividing the number of issues resolved on the first contact by the total number of issues in that time period.
Likewise, you can measure average resolution time, which shows the average time it takes you to resolve all issues.
Customer Referral Rate
A testament to customer advocacy, customer referral rate indicates the percentage of new customers that come from referrals.
A high customer referral rate indicates that your customers are quite pleased with your company and want to spread the word to their family and friends.
Employee Advocacy Metrics
An often overlooked set of CX analytics, employee advocacy can be very telling about your customer experience. If employees aren’t engaged in your brand and actively promoting it, you may need to re-examine the experience your employees endure when trying to serve customers.
Within this set of metrics, you can track things like the percentage of employees who share company content on social media, engagement rates of that content, and the types of content they share.
Measuring Customer Experience Requires a Holistic View
Both quantitative and qualitative customer experience measurements help brands gain a holistic view of the customer experience. Comparing each customer experience measurement helps to put all of your KPIs into greater context and connect the dots between them.
With the advent of AI and natural language processing (NPL), it is now easier to understand these measures of customer experience in a more organic way via social listening.
Combining both quantitative and qualitative customer experience KPIs provides brands with a more holistic view of the way customers really feel about their brand experiences. It also centralizes your customer experience analytics so that all of your data is available in a single place, giving you a more complete picture of your CX program.
Social Listening Gains Importance for CX Measurement
In July 2020, just over half of marketing leaders were utilizing social listening platforms to understand how their audiences were feeling in the wake of the global pandemic. Now, nearly two-thirds of marketers believe that social listening has increased in value for their brands in the past twelve months.
Social listening refers to the process of monitoring social media platforms for mentions of your brand, product, or service. You can do this manually, but it’s easier, faster, and more impactful with the help of purpose-built software like Meltwater Radarly.
Social listening can quickly resolve customer issues and complaints that are brought up on social media platforms. By monitoring these platforms, businesses can see what issues are being discussed and address them in a timely manner. This can improve the overall customer experience as customers feel that their concerns are being heard and addressed.
Additionally, social listening can be used to gather customer feedback and insights. This feedback can be used to improve products or services as well as the overall customer experience.
While social listening has given marketers a much easier way to tap into the customer experience, these tools aren’t enough on their own to craft a well-rounded CX strategy. Rather, marketers can also benefit from deeper-level insights to learn the “why” behind the “what” and connect the dots between mentions, conversations, and cx trends.
Going Beyond Simple Social Listening for Deeper CX Insights
There are many easy-to-use social listening tools available, but not all of them provide the level of detail marketers need to develop deeper insights. These insights can, in turn, lead to better CX strategies. For that level of detail, brands need an end-to-end customer experience platform.
A powerful consumer intelligence tool provides:
- Real-time analysis 24/7
- Normalized ratings and rankings of quantitative CX metrics
- Ability to consolidate data from multiple sources
- Affect, Emotion, and Sentiment Analysis
- Calculate customer experience ROI
- Scalable CX analysis
The right CX data can help brands do the following:
Uncover and Understand Authentic Customer Feedback
One of the drawbacks of relying solely on quantitative metrics such as NPS or CSAT score is that those results may be somewhat skewed by the types of customers that choose to complete surveys.
Similarly, the results of qualitative face-to-face interviews may not accurately reflect the true feelings of participants. Some participants may feel pressure to answer according to what they think the interviewer wants to hear.
For these and other reasons, social listening offers something better. Increasingly comfortable with interacting with friends and family on social media platforms, customers are more likely to share their authentic experiences with brands via social conversations.
When brands can aggregate and analyze ratings, reviews, customer feedback, and social conversations (preferably via one centralized hub), they can quickly get their fingers on the pulse of consumer sentiment. What's more, they can demonstrate customer experience ROI and show why certain changes are necessary to a brand's health.
Improve the In-Store and Online Customer Experience
A current trend in retail customer experience is the blurring of lines between in-store and online customer experience. Prior to the pandemic, in-store customer experiences were the norm, but now, that may no longer be the case. A recent Verizon Look Forward study reported that 42 percent of shoppers anticipate that they will be shopping both in-store and online in the coming year.
What impact should that have on the customer experience strategy for your brand? Simply put, brands must now give immediate attention to how customers view both their online and in-person interactions with the brand.
Customer experience analysis must include customer data from both channels as well as a healthy dose of social listening. When brands can tap into the online conversations consumers are having about their brand, they can quickly build a clearer understanding of their market and the consumer forces that move it.
Brands can use well-designed social listening tools to uncover customer pain points and needs and figure out how consumers really view their products, retail channels, customer service offerings, and even their competitors.
Understand the Real Customer Experience with Products and Services
Customer experience does not simply stop at the point of purchase. Brands must also monitor customer experience across the entire customer journey, from initial research all the way to the end of the customer lifecycle.
A strong CX strategy involves capturing customer sentiment at every stage of the journey. For example, do you have adequate systems in place to measure the friction in your purchase process? What about measuring your contact center complaint percentages and your first-call resolution stats?
A tool that aggregates information from multiple sources, including social media conversations, and makes that data available for holistic analysis can help brands get a global view of customer experience.
Leverage Meltwater Consumer Intelligence for Customer Experience Analytics
Meltwater Radarly consumer intelligence enables superior customer experience analytics.
Far more than just a social listening tool, Radarly applies AI, data science, and human market research expertise to a comprehensive social data stream to uncover deep consumer insights that regular social listening tools alone cannot.
A Case in Point
Pernod Ricard, a world-renowned wine and spirits company, partnered with Meltwater to ensure that social data and consumer insights would drive every decision the company makes.
Remarking on the benefits of the partnership, Florence Rainsard, Global Consumer Insights Director for Pernod Ricard, observed:
Through their social activities, consumers tell us how, when and why they consume our products. In addition, the granularity of social data is a real asset. This detail enables us to identify emerging occasions we were not aware existed. . . .
Get Turnkey, Comprehensive Customer Experience Measurement
Here’s what Meltwater Radarly can do to help your brand with customer experience analysis:
- Automatically aggregate and analyze ratings, reviews, customer feedback, and social conversations with AI-powered sentiment analysis
- Provide detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of your point of sale and distribution network
- Monitor online conversations to discover customer pain points and needs
- Analyze strengths, weaknesses, and points of friction in customer experience with the application of machine learning and the expertise of trained market researchers
- Scale customer experience analysis across all business units, lines of business, and geographies
- Provide real-time analysis that enables faster business decision-making when customer experience challenges or opportunities occur
Radarly provides a turnkey consumer intelligence platform paired with the human market research touch. Are you ready to uncover deep consumer insights and use them to build a better customer experience for your brand?
