It’s an old management truism that what gets measured, gets done – many organisations seem to remember this when setting KPIs but forget it when running VoC programs.
As with any initiative, measuring the success of your Voice of Customer – VoC – program is crucial to developing a strong and scalable solution. Many organisations view VoC metric selection as challenging and are unsure of what to measure, and when.
It’s an old management truism that what gets measured, gets done – many organisations seem to remember this when setting KPIs but forget it when running VoC programs. In fact, putting clear and relevant measurements in place is the only way to run a good customer-experience program. It’s essential to know both what you’re measuring and how to measure it, and then how to turn that information into actionable insights.
Our Principle Consultant of Customer Experience, Kyle Groff, has identified four key customer metrics to measure for a successful VoC program:
- Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction – CSAT – quantifies how well specific products or elements of the customer experience meet their expectations, usually by using a response scale.
- Net promoter score
Net promoter score – NPS – measures a customer’s intention and is derived from asking customers a single question, ‘how likely is it that you would recommend [company] to a friend or colleague?’
Using a rating scale, respondents are grouped into three categories: detractors, passives, and promoters. Companies calculate the NPS by subtracting the percentage of customers who are detractors from the percentage of customers who are promoters.
- Customer effort score
Customer effort score – CES – measures how much effort a customer has to use to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, or a question answered. This is a good measurement to track over time.
- Brand drivers
Brand Drivers – BD – measures the importance of key product and service offerings across not only current customers, but also target future customers. This allows organisations to measure the viability of current and new product and service offerings to ensure they are delivering to customers’ needs/wants and staying relevant in the market.
Organisations that aren’t measuring these four metrics are unlikely to have a genuine understanding of how their customers and markets view them. As a result, they’re less able to respond to customer sentiment and may find it difficult to compete effectively.
Measuring these elements doesn’t have to be difficult. For example, our solution provides the balance of full-function capability, with a scalable and easy-to-use VoC platform. This enables organisations to have a flexible and agile program where the company can start small, implement that, learn and iterate and then grow the program out in terms of capabilities/customer touchpoints, scale and measurements.
Effective measurement does require a mind-shift for organisations that have not had a strong measurement culture until now.
Bill McMurray, APAC Managing Director, Qualtrics