Can you measure CX real-time, in the moment? Are you confident that you have an objective measure of your CX? Can you benchmark your CX with your competitors?
In my experience, the answer for most organizations is “No.”
Organizations find themselves anxiously awaiting CSAT and NPS results, investing dollars and time in the process. Don’t get me wrong. These KPIs are great metrics. They are common, simple, and easy to understand. However, they are incomplete measurements on their own, more specifically:
- They are not forward looking
- They are not directly actionable
- They are not real-time
I would like to introduce a new approach around measuring, testing, and managing CX with an innovative series of operational metrics. We call them…Operational Customer Experience (OCX). These metrics are:
- Measured in real-time,
- Based on actual customer interactions with your channels,
- Scientific and not subjective, and
- Allow you to benchmark to your industry or with the broader market.
What is OCX?
- A series of innovative, actual customer experience KPIs
- A real-time measurement of what your customers are experiencing in the moment
- An objective measurement based on real data
What exactly is being measured?
- Loss of customer contact: stuck or dropped calls
- Bad interactions: latency, poor voice quality
- Accuracy: of routing, data and prompts
Why OCX?
Any one of the above experiences impacts your organization’s CX. Loss of customer calls can lead to a direct loss of revenue, depending on the type of caller, and drive repeat call volume into your call centers. Bad, low quality, interactions lead to a poor customer experience, reduced NPS and possible impact on customer retention. Low accuracy in your IVR can not only lead to a poor customer experience, but an increase in costs in your call center, such as in AHT if the agent has to re-authenticate or re-route the call to another agent.
An example of the impact of OCX measurement came from one of our newer Fortune 100 customers who had a “3 pm Problem”. One of the IT groups executed an application backup at 3 pm everyday. The backup caused network quality to degrade which caused thousands of customer calls to drop every day at 3 pm. Because other IT groups did not know about this backup, the support reps no longer reported on it because they got used to it, and customers would just call back, driving repeat call volume. An NPS survey did not discover this…but an automated testing and monitoring program which reported OCX metrics did.
Cyara is in the early stages of leveraging this valuable data for our customers to draw unique insights. With over 3.5 billion seconds of traffic going over our cloud platform this past year, we have been able to capture trends across industries and geographies. While we have only scratched the surface, we’re already seeing powerful insights and even more powerful questions.
The below represents a sampling using our data to date:
Call Success Rate
- A bigger metric is better, as it shows higher levels of success
- Healthcare is a consistent leader at 93%
- Logistics is lagging at less than 70%
Time to Connect
- A smaller metric is typically better, as you want to connect customers quickly to your IVR
- Telco and Mass Media are leading at less than 3 seconds
- Tourism & Hospitality is lagging at over 4 seconds
Prompt Response Time
- A smaller metric is typically better, as you want to respond quickly to customers and keep them engaged.
- Energy and Retail are leading at less than 1 second
- Healthcare and Tourism & Hospitality show a lag at almost 2-4 seconds
Powerful Questions:
- What specific Customer Experience of leaders and laggers are driving performance, or lack thereof?
- Why would a traditionally high CX focused industry lag behind a less focused one?
- Who is leading in CX across all industries? What are they doing so well?
- Which OCX metrics are most important to my organization and industry?
- What should my KPIs be set at for each metric?
- How are my competitors performing across these metrics? How far ahead/behind am I?
- What should I be doing in response to my organizations OCX performance?
- How specifically can Cyara help my organization improve?
There is so much depth left to explore in this area, and we look forward to bringing knowledge and insights to help our customers and the industry as a whole! If this topic is of particular interest to you or your organization and you’d like to explore further with Cyara, please reach out to us at hello@cyara.com.