How Customer Experience Analytics Enhance Customer Service

Customer experience is your customers’ overall perceptions and feelings about your business and brand based on interactions they have had with you. Unlike customer service, which is related to a specific touchpoint, the overall customer experience is derived from every interaction your customer has ever had with your company.

Customer experience analytics includes the collecting and analyzing of data related to this experience. It requires you to review every stage of the buyer’s journey from awareness to sales conversions and beyond, as well as each interaction point. Doing so will help you improve the customer experience which leads to increased loyalty, engagement and conversion. 

Customer experience metrics 

There are a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) related to the customer experience. 

Common ones include: 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) – assesses customer loyalty using percentage of promoters and percentage of detractors and is determined by asking customers to rate the likelihood of recommending the company. 
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) – uses customer feedback to quantify satisfaction with the company and is determined by asking customers how they would rate their overall satisfaction with your good/service. 
• Churn rate – the rate at which customers stop doing business with you and is equal to the number of customers you lost in a period divided by the number of customers who started. 
• Retention rate – the percentage of customers that stay with your business and is calculated dividing the number of customers you have at the end of a specific period by the number you started with. 
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – is the total worth a customer brings to your business over the lifetime of their relationship with you and is determined by multiplying the customer value by average customer lifespan. 
• Customer Effort Score (CES) – tells you how much effort a customer has to put in to complete an action with your business, such as buying or returning a product, resolving an issue, etc. and is determined using questions about how easy your customer’s experience was.

How customer experience analytics can help improve customer service 

Customer experience analytics help you make informed decisions about your customer service, sales, marketing, and more. That’s because it provides hard facts about how your customers really perceive the experience of buying from you. After-all, the way a business views their brand isn’t necessarily the same as how a customer views the brand and this insight can be transformative. 

Here are some of the ways customer experience analytics can help you improve your customer service: 

Understanding what your customers like about your business and what they don’t like will help you better anticipate your customer’s needs and proactively prepare to address issues. Having solutions prepared in advance can mediate common reasons for churn and dissatisfaction while your team works on finding a more permanent solution. 

When you understand the customer experience, you can better target agent training to focus on addressing key issues. You can also use this information to create customer service scripts, as well as resources that your team can use themselves or send to customers. Having agents trained and prepared to help customers with known challenges, or better informed about product features, will improve your company’s customer service and in turn the customer experience. 

When dealing with a frustrated customer, it can be hard to remember that obtaining a new customer is much more costly than retaining a current one. By ensuring your customer service team (and other departments) understand what it means to lose a customer, you can remind them how important it is to provide a good experience. Customer experience analytics provides on-going trends that highlight areas to improve and success stories.

Interested in learning more about improving your customer experience with customer analytics? Get in touch with Advantage Communications today.