As organizations focus on delivering the best possible customer journeys, many are looking to expand the body of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they track.
“Rear-View Mirror” Metrics
There are many ways to measure your customer experience (CX). Common metrics include average churn, NPS, and CSAT. While these are very important metrics, they are all backward-looking. They tell you about the customer experience you have already delivered, and the customers you have already delighted…..or lost. Wouldn’t it be better to know if the CX you are delivering is going to cause a drop in these metrics?
That kind of visibility requires a different set of metrics. We have found that organizations that track more forward-looking metrics can gain valuable insight into how their customers will rate them. Forward-looking metrics take many forms, including operational items such as audio quality, dropped calls, or other measures of details that can have a profound impact on your CX. We call this set of metrics, Operational Customer Experience (OCX).
Forward-Looking KPIs
OCX is a framework of metrics for the quality of how a customer experiences a company’s customer service systems. In a Frost & Sullivan survey, organizations around the world reported low CSAT resulted in 45% lower revenue and a 60% drop in new customer acquisition. Measuring OCX provides a company with the ability to view a customer’s journey across digital channels from an outside-in perspective using objective and repeatable methods.
These metrics can also reflect the speed and quality associated with developing new features in your customer-facing systems. This category would include KPIs such as:
- Time-to-market for new apps and services
- The number of defects detected in each stage of the development lifecycle (development, testing, deployment, and live systems)
- Speed of eliminating defects in the live system
- Test coverage percentage: how many customer journeys are tested
- Monitoring coverage percentage: the percentage of customer journeys are monitored
