Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, a day that symbolizes love. And just as flowers and chocolate are the language of love for couples, the language of love between you and your customer is your CX.
What does your CX say about you? Do your customers find you CX-y? If you’re like most organizations, you don’t know. You know CX is a priority. You know you’ve invested in redesigning or upgrading your CX. But do you actually know how your customers feel about the CX you deliver? And, it’s no wonder so many of us don’t know how we’re doing — 96% of customers won’t tell organizations if they’ve had a bad experience.
If your customers aren’t telling you if your CX is good or bad, how do you know how you’re doing? A good CX measurement program helps. Most companies start with high level metrics like NPS or CSat, and that’s a great step, but is not enough. NPS and CSat are great scorecards, but they aren’t terribly actionable and are often rear-view mirrors. They can tell you whether you’re doing well or poorly, but often won’t tell you why and what you can do to improve in real time.
Measuring Operational Customer Experience
To understand what you can do to improve your CX scores, you need to complement those scorecard metrics with more tactical, but highly actionable metrics that can tell you how you’re doing at an operational level.
For any organization with a contact center, a great source of this type of operational metric is from your CX applications. These are the applications your customers use to engage with you every day. We partnered with analyst firm, Frost & Sullivan, to survey 209 contact center leaders and found that 89% of them saw moderate to severe impact on their customer satisfaction from operational CX. And it’s not just the big issues like the IVR falling over, resulting in a lot more calls to agents and long wait times. Of course, it’s important to identify and resolve those issues quickly. Equally important, and perhaps more insidious, are the small issues, the little annoyances — like slow response times, poor voice quality, or misrouted calls — that represent death by a thousand papercuts for your CX. Tracking these operational metrics, and seeing when they fail to meet thresholds, is exactly the insight you need to make tweaks to your CX applications before you see NPS/CSat scores fall.
Monitoring Your CX from the Customer’s Perspective
The key to being able to identify these operational issues is to monitor your CX applications from the customer perspective. And the best way to do that is to create automated, synthetic interactions that replicate real-world customer journeys. Only by replicating your customer journeys will you be able to make sure that your CX applications — IVR, email, web, chat, and SMS — are performing as designed, and enabling customers to accomplish their goals effectively and efficiently.
So, this Valentine’s Day, get CX-y. Upgrade your CX measurement capabilities and ensure that you delight your customers each and every time you engage. Visit cyara.com/products/pulse/ to learn more about our CX monitoring capabilities. Just call Cyara the customer love doctor — we can help you be very, very CX-y.