Keeping customers is way more important and cost-effective than acquiring new ones. They draw stable recurring income to your firm, making it financially stable. So, businesses strive hard to retain their customers, once acquired. On that account, tracking customer experience is imperative for all kinds of businesses.
It helps you to learn your strengths, weaknesses, avenues that need improvement, and also the factors your customers find difficult to go along with your brand. In this article, we have gathered the essential metrics and procedures to track customer experience beyond purchase.
Disseminating Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer satisfaction surveys are a conventional, yet prolific approach to tracking customer happiness post sales. Such surveys generally consist of questions that are intended to cognize how satisfied the customers are and their pain points.
Some of the adept methods to disperse customer satisfaction surveys are:
Live Surveys - Here, you utilize your live chat option to learn your customers’ judgment about your product/service. Live chat enables you to integrate a feedback bar or rating system with the chat console, where your customers could contribute their inputs.
Post Service Surveys - You can assess the level of customer satisfaction with a particular service, with these kinds of surveys. Here, the survey inquiries are put forward to the customer’s right after the specific service is offered.
Email Surveys - While the above methods are good for short and quick discernment; email surveys serve well for a detailed one. Accordingly, an email with a series of questions relating to the product and service is sent to the customers.
Focus on Reverse Logistics
Reverse logistics is a new-age concept that describes better ways to get a product shipped backward to the supply chain. It greatly helps to propagate a better customer experience, with a competitive edge, relating to customer returns and unsold goods.
The core idea of the reverse logistics is to recapture the value of the returning goods. At the same time, it also helps to enhance the service throughout the supply chain.
Some of the benefits of reverse logistics in terms of customer satisfaction are:
- You can acquire valuable feedback from the customer during the return process. This helps you to identify the common pain points, and also offers the opportunity to rectify them in future.
- You can establish quick and efficient repairs or replacements of damaged or faulty products. This fetches you better customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- You can anticipate customers’ needs and wants more accurately way ahead. Hence, you can serve them well with swift delivery of the goods.
Quantifying Response Times
77% of people consider that valuing their time is the most important factor in good customer support. So, your response times for customer queries can say a lot about your customers’ happiness.
Meanwhile, it’s also said that 50% of customers wait until a week before terminating their relationship with a brand. To be precise, customers aren’t extremely demanding for instant response and resolutions. In most cases, they manage to wait calmly until their issue is addressed.
However, slow services levy a lethargic and uncaring perspective upon your business. In that respect, the important parameter to quantify is your 24-hour response rate. Tracking your turnaround potential for a day facilitates your endeavors in gauging your customers’ experience.
Deploying Post-Sale staff
Ventures engage profoundly in shaping their marketing teams and lead generation processes, to achieve more new customers. But a successful business also greatly relies on customer retention and iterative purchases. For this, one must concentrate on fostering the acquired customers.
Accounting it, firms should consider designating a dedicated workforce to engage with customers after they’ve completed a purchase, with prompt follow-up procedures. They’ll be responsible to resolve any issues the customers are facing after the sale and will eventually document it.
This report becomes the pertinent data to deduce the customer happiness - as it holds a record of the kinds of issues, its impact, customers’ views about it, etc. for which resolutions are sought for. This way, the post-sale staff can notify the post-sale customer satisfaction, as they remediate the issues.
Analyzing Overall Customer Experience Ratings
Measuring customer satisfaction after each interaction is important. Yet, it isn’t actually adequate to calculate the overall experience of a customer with your brand.
In general, customers won’t ignore a brand for one or two poor interactions. But they make the move only if the experience they obtain on the whole is disrupted.
For instance, customers might have had a bad experience in a previous episode, before the right resolution was provided. So, their rating to the two different interactions would vary. However, their experience with the firm’s service is defined by both of the interactions aggregated together.
Therefore, a good customer experience is composed of multiple interactions and you have to ponder upon metrics observing all of them. By doing this, you can avail a better idea on the level of customer satisfaction for your offerings.
Tracking the number of Replies to a Resolution
Resolving a customer query becomes tedious when your support team isn’t able to locate the exact cause of the problem. Subsequently, the agents would request the customers to carry out varied tryouts in order to identify it. At length, it leads to an increased number of replies to the conversation.
The said scenario is ultimately one of the biggest frustrations for the customers. On the other hand, when a shrewd resolution is offered for a customer query, where they feel happy and satisfied - the length of the conversation is conceivably short.
Thus, tracking the number of replies to a resolution can help you define your customers’ experience. In other words, you can simply infer that the customer satisfaction is crippled when the conversation is too long.
Inference
Customer experience is an important entity for your efforts to strengthen your business’ growth. Hence, tracking it is crucial for knowing what drives your customers away and what makes them stay. The methods and parameters mentioned throughout this article will serve as powerful tools to discern the level of your customers’ happiness.