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In the business world, customer experience quality is an important measure of success. You want your customers to be happy so that they’ll keep coming back—and maybe recommend you to their friends and family. The more happy customers you have, the better off you’ll be.
But how do you know how satisfied they are with your customer experience (CX)? In this blog, we’ll explore the ins and outs of customer experience quality analysis. Discover the definition of CX quality, what benefits your business can reap, and how to start assessing it.
Simply put, customer experience quality is the measure of how satisfied or unsatisfied your customers are—both paying and prospective. It encompasses every touchpoint from initial discovery of your brand to post-purchase support.
If your business has great CX, your customers will feel valued, understood, and pleased with their interactions. They had a need or desire, and your offerings met those with class and convenience. On the other hand, if your CX is inconsistent, unprofessional, and unwelcoming, customers will leave feeling frustrated and dissatisfied. They might still keep what they paid for—but they won’t be back, and will likely tell their friends and family to avoid you. That’s what makes measuring and monitoring your customer experience quality so important.
Granted, the customer experience quality metric isn’t the end-all of your business. There are plenty of other ways to generate ROI (return on investment). For example, marketing initiatives or product development could be major players. However, at the end of the day, your business is converting customers. But how well, and to what extent? And are there ways you can improve it to attract more—and returning—customers? You won’t know until you evaluate.
Now that we’ve outlined the role and relevance of customer experience quality, let’s talk about the benefits that directly affect your business.
If you haven’t created metrics for evaluating your customer experience quality yet, your first report is critically important. This is the baseline from which all your changes—and, hopefully, improvements—will be measured. Monitoring your CX should be a continual part of your overall business strategy. This will help you identify new issues as they arrive, as well as provide hard data to show how much improvement you’ve made.
There are other benefits that can blossom from a good CX evaluation program put into action.
Better Customer Service
With up-to-date CX data, you’ll be able to anticipate customer issues before they happen and proactively create protocols to handle them. That way, you’ll streamline your customer service department, and customers will find their issues resolved more quickly and consistently. This leads to higher and more comprehensive customer experience quality.
More Positive Reviews
When you have more happy customers, you’ll organically generate more glowing feedback online. Even without any extra effort, your happy patrons will start going the extra mile to share how good their experience was. Between great customer experience quality and improved customer service, they’ll find a positive experience no matter what happens.
Fewer Missed Opportunities
By measuring various customer experience quality metrics, businesses often find new opportunities for success. For example, customers might really enjoy or get excited about a particular aspect of your business. By capitalizing on that excitement, you can quickly and easily boost your bottom line with little extra effort.
Undoubtedly, taking a close look at your customer experience quality is a powerful, lucrative strategy. After all, any of these strategies on their own would provide a great ROI. Put them together, and it’s clear that CX evaluations are worth more than their weight in gold. While other aspects of your business certainly warrant attention, the simplicity and value of CX can’t be overlooked. You can boost your bottom line in any number of ways—without touching your business model.
With that said, how do you start measuring your customer experience quality? There are plenty of methodologies available, but we’ll cover the five basic—and most important—metrics you can use almost immediately.
If you want to hear about the quality of your customer experience, it’s great to get your data straight from the horse’s mouth. In fact, you may have plenty of data before you even start your CX evaluation strategy. Reviews from various online platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook can provide you with quick insight into the current state of your CX. Often, Likert-style scales like the five-star rating system can even aggregate and quantify this data for you.
Another way to hear about your customer experience quality directly is to ask them about it. With a well-structured customer survey, you can get feedback on any number of details about your business. For example, how satisfied were customers with the products they purchased? Did they have any issues? Was the customer service staff friendly, compassionate, and helpful? While customer reviews are generally unprompted and thus unstructured, customer surveys can gather hard, quantifiable data quickly about specific operational aspects of your CX.
This subcategory of customer surveys focuses on how much a customer will recommend your business to others. Notably, this metric shows both positive and negative directions—like if customers will actively recommend against you.
Net Promoter Scores (NPS) work by asking customers a simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to others?" Based on their response, customers are categorized into three groups:
To calculate your NPS, subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The resulting score can range from -100 to +100.
NPS represents a key metric of customer experience quality. It reveals customer loyalty, helping you understand how well your business is fostering strong relationships. Plus, by tracking NPS over time, you can spot trends and work on areas that cause dissatisfaction. Finally, converting Detractors into Promoters marks a clear enhancement of your CX while creating advocates for your brand and reducing customer churn.
In a similar vein, you can get some great data from your own staff about customer service—a critical aspect of customer experience quality. Even with the best-planned offerings, things happen. Some of your customers will come back with issues and requests for reimbursements or replacements. How your staff handles these situations could mean the difference between a great experience and a disaster. In fact, customers tend to trust and support businesses more when they resolve issues in a timely, professional, and satisfactory manner. You don’t even have to let unsatisfied customers walk all over you. Simply being positive and solution-oriented can greatly increase your customer experience quality.
On the other hand, there are plenty of internal places to find data about your customer experience quality. For example, how many repeat customers do you have? What key indicators can show whether a customer will be back for more? How often do people return products or ask for refunds? Are you receiving referrals from previous customers? Finally, how have these metrics changed over time? By aggregating information like this, you’ll get a great gauge on your CX and also find places to improve and boost your CX.
Most of the metrics we’ve mentioned so far will only give you a subjective or qualitative analysis. If you want to get honest, objective, and expert feedback on your customer experience quality, the best place to start is with a mystery shop. These mystery shops, also known as CX evaluations, are performed by industry experts with great insight on data-driven business strategies. They can offer you advice as well as valuable intelligence about your overall CX. Plus, you can even tailor a CX evaluation to focus on specific aspects of your business, like returns.
If you’re concerned that your business might be too small to warrant an official mystery shop—or that it might be too expensive or time-consuming—don’t worry. You can get high-quality CX evaluations from CustomerOptix to boost the success rate of your growing business. Plus, it’s quick, easy, and affordable, so you can get back to running your business.
Delivering a top-notch customer experience is an essential element of doing business in today’s competitive landscape. By measuring customer experience quality regularly, you can identify areas of improvement, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive repeat business. Plus, you’ll catch potential issues before they become bigger—and costlier—problems. Whether you use data from customer reviews, surveys, or mystery shops, assessing your CX gives you actionable insights to make informed, data-driven decisions.
Start investing in your customer experience today. You’ll soon see how you can unlock the potential for stronger customer relationships, higher retention rates, and greater business growth.
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