This is a post submitted by a guest contributor.

Prioritizing customer experience is what separates winning brands from the rest. And it’s true, satisfied customers tend to promote your brand and even increase revenue. But ultimately, your product or its price won’t matter unless you’re attracting and engaging customers on a more personal level. And gauging the effectiveness of customer experience without proper metrics in place can be time-consuming and useless.

So, how can you improve your customer experience? 

Luckily, there are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help.

Table of contents

Conversion Rate

Arguably the most important KPI of all: conversion rate. This is the turning point where leads become customers.

There might be multiple reasons why a customer converted like affordable pricing, or how a product compares to competitors. But, looking beyond those variables, you’ll also need to look at how customer experience contributed to the sale.

Whether it’s intuitive web design, engaging salespeople, or awesome customer support, it’s important to note these factors that help aid customer experience. That way, you can double down on factors that influenced converting users.

First Contact Resolution

For starters, this KPI refers to the initial contact between customers and your support staff. Most of the time, contact is initiated by a customer submitting a ticket via an email ticketing system due to an issue.

Once your support team solves the problem, they can tag the ticket as completed. This means that the issue has been resolved upon first contact. As a brand, it’s vital to strive for first contact resolution (FCR) because it influences your customer’s views on your brand’s values.

It’s key to note that you want to eliminate multiple ticket issues. Multiple ticket issues decrease customer satisfaction, which may cause customers to consider a competitor instead. At the same time, you don’t want your support team to deal with the same issue, unable to resolve the problem efficiently. So, remember to update CRMs, FAQs, or other back-office solutions which can help improve agent problem solving and FCR. Note typical problems that users face, which staff members can best resolve the issue efficiently, and how you can communicate more effectively with your audience on large-scale problems.

Average Resolution Time

While some customers don’t mind the ticketing system, it can sometimes take up to hours, and possibly days for a reply. So be mindful that many customers want answers quickly, and that it’s best practice to establish expected response time from employees. Try to simplify the process of resolving any issues that arise from customers, like using FAQ sections or automated responses to guide customers toward resolution.

Another great place to start: providing additional ways for clients to reach out to you aside from tickets, emails, and phone calls. Livechat has become increasingly popular for customer service. Today it’s typically best practice, as it’s accessible compared to other forms of communication. By decreasing the average resolution time, you can show customers how efficient your business is when it comes to addressing concerns. And ultimately, that you value customer feedback.

Customer Churn Rate & Customer Satisfaction

Sometimes customers unsubscribe from your services. It’s just a fact and a natural part of the business cycle. This is referred to as churn, and while it’s pretty normal, there are a couple of things you can do to improve customer satisfaction, and ultimately, reduce churn.

Remember, customer experience plays a key role in customer satisfaction and brand satisfaction. A great place to start is implementing a customer satisfaction survey. This way, you can focus your efforts on why customers may be unsatisfied, and determine your customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

Getting customer reviews through a survey ticket system or sending a message on livechat is critical for improving your customer experience. You can survey visitors at a particular point of interaction on your site like a landing page, blog post, or while they’re shopping for items. As we mentioned before, consider customer experience issues with how your customer support answers questions, the quality of their answers, and the timing. From there, you can make the necessary changes to improve the process. 

Moving forward, continue to brainstorm other creative ways to increase customer satisfaction. If you’re keeping churn rate to a minimum, then you’re obviously doing something right. And that’s a good thing – it shows that your customers are loyal, which means they’re happy with your brand.

Net Promoter Score

Similar to CSAT, net promoter score (NPS) is another metric that gathers your customer’s general sentiment towards your brand. Unlike CSAT, however, NPS asks how likely customers are to suggest your business to others. You can use survey tools like SurveyMonkey or Birdeye to collect NPS from customers.

The higher the score (on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the highest), the greater the chances that they’ll refer more people. If you receive a low average NPS, then you may need to work on giving more value back to customers. It’s important to note that you never want customers to feel like they’re just a sales number. So, make it a point to make your customers feel valued. Valuing customer feedback and engagement can create a community, whether online or offline, with shared goals.

Similar to identifying the reasons for your churn rate, you’ll need to figure out what’s keeping your customers from referring your business to family and friends. Maybe it’s a mistake you made in the past, or perhaps, something you haven’t been doing. Either way, finding out the reason for your low NPS allows you to improve and better your company.

Conclusion

The fact of the matter is, the key to effective customer experience is integration. Remember, people don’t want to be seen as just a sales number. As customers, they want their voices to matter, and ultimately, to be heard. 

So, hear them out, gather feedback, and use their input to improve your business.

Therefore, by using the KPIs for customer experience above, you can help provide users and customers with a better experience.

Author bio

Shealyn Rager is a content marketer at RankPay, an industry-leading SEO service that helps hundreds of small and midmarket businesses grow their digital footprint.