The number of companies with dedicated oversight on customer experience (CX) increases daily, with over 40% of leaders reporting directly to the CEO, according to Gartner. This level of CEO oversight is reflective of the importance of customer experience and the impact it has on a company’s bottom line.
Data plays a critical role in helping companies make informed decisions that drive the business forward. Customer success metrics can help you:
- Evaluate & improve key parts of your customer journey
- Expedite customer support interactions with the most frustrated customers
- Operationalize proactive support
- Test different support strategies
But how do you measure and gather quantitative data on a qualitative concept like customer experience and customer loyalty? That’s the question we’ll answer in this post.
How to measure customer experience
- Identify key areas of your customer journey to measure
- Create customer satisfaction & feedback surveys
- Set up triggers and timing of survey ‘sends’
- Set up automation to take action on unsatisfied and satisfied customer feedback
1. Identify key areas of your customer journey to measure
It’s far more expensive to acquire a new customer than retaining the one you already have, and one way to gain an understanding of whether or not you’re going to keep a customer is by looking at data.
Customer success metrics, typically gathered using customer feedback surveys, give you an unfiltered evaluation of your performance and customers’ level of happiness, so it’s critical to collect data at key areas of your customer journey - for example, after completing the on-boarding process or engaging with your customer support team. You should also consider collecting feedback on any educational or support resources your team has built out, like articles in your knowledge base, to measure how helpful they are to your customers.
2. Create customer satisfaction & feedback surveys
Customer feedback surveys can help identify where and when you need to focus your attention on a particular customer to correct a wrong & make it right, helping you maintain a positive relationship with that customer.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), calculated using customer feedback surveys, measures how satisfied a customer is with your product or services immediately after a specific experience or engagement, such as completing the onboarding process, reading an educational or support resource on your site, or chatting with customer support.
CSAT can be collected and measured by setting up customer experience surveys in HubSpot.
It’s important to note that how you ask a question affects the answers you’ll receive, and thus the quality or legitimacy of your data. We won’t bore you with the psychology of it all, but we recommend a simple, open-ended question like, “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with your experience today?”.
To measure how you’re doing, calculate the percent of customers who rated themselves as (very) satisfied - you should aim for 80% or higher. If you’re using HubSpot to measure customer success, you can add pre-built reports on customer experience and CSAT ratings to your reporting dashboard (more on that in part 3 of this series).
3. Setup triggers & timing of survey ‘sends’
Customer satisfaction surveys should be sent via email as soon as possible following an interaction with your customer support team, but they can also be triggered to go out after a set period of time has passed after a prospect becomes a customer or at the key stages of your customer journey to measure how satisfaction varies throughout a relationship.
Customer feedback surveys can also be delivered via pop-ups on pages of your website - these can be a great way to measure customer feedback on support resources or educational content, like knowledge base articles, that your team has created to help customers with common goals, needs, challenges, or questions.
Set up automation to drive action on unsatisfied and satisfied customers
Quick action to address unsatisfied customers needs is critical. Using HubSpot workflow automation, build out a strategy that alerts and empowers your team to quickly act on customers in need of additional attention or support.
Data is intended to be used to inform business decisions that drive your company forward. As you build out customer feedback surveys, ask yourself “If a customer provides feedback x, what should our team do with that information?”. Responding to valuable customers who complete a feedback survey, even if action isn’t warranted, is the most important and most frequently skipped part of a successful customer success strategy.
How to Measure Customer Loyalty
Studies have shown that customer loyalty increases as customer experiences improve, and corresponding satisfaction scores (like CSAT) can be a predictive indicator of how loyal a customer is to you.
Source: Qualtrics; ROI of Customer Experience, 2018
Customer experience data, collected immediately after an engagement occurs, can inform action to right a wrong and help predict customer loyalty. You can also measure customer loyalty on a monthly, quarterly, and/or annual basis through Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys.
NPS is the percentage of your customers who would recommend your company to their friends, family, or colleagues. NPS scores, typically measured on a scale of 1-10 with a survey that asks, “How likely are you to recommend this business?”, provide a lagging indicator of how happy your customers are with your product or services. You can calculate your NPS score using customer loyalty surveys in HubSpot.
Your NPS is calculated by subtracting the Detractors (scores 0-6) from the Promoters (Scores 9-10) and can be used to identify those who are most likely to stick with you and provide you referrals. Your aggregate NPS score provides you an immediate health check and longitudinal metric you can track and work to improve over time. You should aim for an average score above 50, but companies nailing customer success are pushing a score in the neighborhood of 70.
Source: Retently
You can also measure customer loyalty by looking at customer retention and revenue growth with existing customers through metrics like:
- Expansion revenue: The percentage of revenue coming from expanding product or services sold to existing customers
- Customer churn rate: The percentage of customers who quit using your products or services
- New MRR churn: The percentage of revenue growth achieved - companies performing at the highest level will grow by 129% annually without acquiring a single new customer.
[Calculate: Revenue lost from customer churn & down selling - expansion revenue in a given month / Revenue you had at the end of the previous month]
[Calculate: New revenue from upsells & cross-sells in a month / Revenue at the end of the previous month]
[Calculate: # of customers you lost in a given quarter / # of customers you had at the end of the previous quarter]
Simply collecting feedback and measuring customer success will help you better understand how you’re performing and improve your customer experience through better insights and actionable takeaways. But developing and implementing a customer success strategy takes time, so it’s important to put the data to use and help inform business decisions. In the next part of this series, we’ll discuss automating reporting on customer experience in HubSpot.