2015年1月23日 星期五

How to measure customer experience?

          When we focus on product and service innovation, what will customers get from you? If you sell a product, what buyer feels from finding the product, using it, making it broken, fixing it and then buy another product? If you provide services, how will customers feel from getting the service information, trying, renewal and buy from others? As a seller, what kind of customers you want to sell? One time customer or loyal customer?


We are in the customer-centric age, how we understand our customer is the major topic of business objective. Even in the Balance Score Card, one of the four perspectives is customer. The journey of customer will imply the company’s operation and revenue. How we measure our customers’ experience? Following are the common metrics:

CSAT: Customer Satisfaction Scores, it’s a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals.[1]



NPS: Net Promoter Scores, it’s a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm's customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and claims to be correlated with revenue growth. NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are Detractors from the percentage of customers who are Promoters. [2]

CES: Customer Effort Score, it’s derived from one question that you'll add to your post-transactional surveys to assess the degree of effort that the customer had to exert in order to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, a product purchased/returned, or a question answered.[3]


         How these metrics apply in the business and what’s difference of them? Can these metrics really represent all customers?  The HBR (Harvard Business Review) evaluated the predictive power of these three metrics at 2010.[4] The research focused on the customer loyalty and verified the customers’ intention to keep doing business with company, spending more money, or spread positive (and not negative) word of mouth. CSAT is poor for prediction of customer behavior and only shows result of campaigns or activities. NPS is better for company level of branding when the positive word of mouth more than before. HBR shows CES is better to predict customer behavior for repurchasing and increasing spending.   


            Actually, metrics are still the reference and the best customer experience should from thinking as a customer. What you will feel when using the product or service?  Putting yourself into customer’s shoes and understand their difficulty in the same scenario. Every metrics here are still too lag. Only company culture will prevent the bad customer experience and make everyone happy. Happy employees will bring more customers, better brand and sustainable enterprise.   



[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_satisfaction
[2] http://www.netpromotersystem.com
[3] http://www.executiveboard.com/exbd/sales-service/effortless-experience/index.page
[4] https://hbr.org/2010/07/stop-trying-to-delight-your-customers

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