Customer experience analytics consists of all metrics that are required to understand the customer footprint. Making use of the data available at each touchpoint in the Customer Experience journey will allow organisations to empower their teams and steer them in the right direction to improve the cx journey.
Each customer interaction is a touch point which involves a different set of disparate systems that stores and processes data. To analyse all of the data in your customer journey and to make sense of the data, first define the metrics that you would like to track for your customers.
How do you give the best customer experience?
The perfect customer experience is a well thought-out series of interactions that consistently exceed a customer’s needs and expectations.
How do you create a seamless customer experience across an array of channels? You need a data-driven approach to do this. We will help you find your weak parts in order to maximize your strengths.
Clearly define your metrics
As part of your customer experience strategy define the core metrics that you want to produce. Define your customer profiles based on your target markets.
1. Customer profiles – customer profiles can be categorised by industry, by age group, by location, by occupation etc. based on the target market. See the diagrams below for example:
Assign a set of measures that you would want to track for each customer profile. The list of measures should include all aspects of the customer journey from prospect to opportunity.
2. Prospect KPIs – As part of the customer experience journey it is important to understand your marketing efforts by way of defining the metrics for your prospects. This includes website traffic, understanding conversion rates etc.
3. Opportunity KPIs – After prospects are engaged there will be a lot of effort needed to qualify them for the next stage of the journey to being an opportunity. Again, a better way to track whether your efforts are working or not, is by tracking Lead to MQL to SQL ratio, opportunity engagement etc.
Once you can understand your customer insights properly and their level of loyalty, it will help you increase your customer retention rates.
4. Customer Loyalty KPIs – Understanding customer loyalty allows organisations to understand if they are able to retain the customer for longer periods or if a customer had a bad experience. It is vital to understand and act sooner than later.
Various sets of metrics could be employed here including Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction Index, Lifetime value of the customer, First Response Time (FRT), Customer Retention Rate (CRR) etc.
5. Product/Service KPIs – Product or Service KPIs are an indirect measure of understanding customer experience. These measures are related to the product or service provided to the customer and will help to keep the product/service relevant to changing trends and behaviours.
Measure can include Quality Metrics (by year/by quarter/by month), Uptime reports (applies for systems, machinery etc.), Throughput Reports, Customer Returns Reports etc.
While defining KPIs, we recommend that you utilise best practices noted in Lean Analytics and employ the following principles for KPIs
- Use Ratios and Ranges
- Use Quantitative and Qualitative KPIs
- Use Lagging and Leading Indicators
- Use Trends
Understand data sources.
Once you know the list of measures that you would want to track, then understand how you can get your data. The first step to understanding your data source is to start mapping out the list of attributes required for each of the KPIs defined above.
Level 1
Level 2 – Metric 1
First mapping is done at level 0 to understand the details required for a KPI. The next step is to dig deep and clearly understand the metrics, hence in some cases it might take multiple levels to get to the data point that you were interested in. A data point will act as a single unit of information required to feed into the KPI measure.
Data is generally available in disparate systems and in the example above there were 2 systems involved CRM and ERP. Again, CRM or ERP can be comprised of multiple systems or in some cases a single system.
Extract your data.
Once mapping of KPIs to data sources is completed, the next step is to understand how you can extract your data from the data sources. Each of the data source will allow a different type of extraction, so map out all the data sources with their method of data extraction.
In the example shown above, customer data can be extracted from Dynamics 365 with an API which provides real-time data. Depending on the system, in some cases an intermediate layer which acts as a holding area might be necessary. In other cases data can only be extracted at specific times.
It is critical to map out all your data sources and produce a data extraction plan. This exercise might take a while but is necessary to complete.
Take Action
Now it’s time to understand the toolset for creating KPIs. The toolset will include the type of infrastructure (for storing, processing, and serving), processing (for extraction integration etc.) and presentation (how KPIs are visualised or reported).
After understanding the toolset produce an action plan, this should be a detailed project plan. The plan should broken down into different phases of the project: Discovery, analysis, implementation, test and go-live.
Here is a sample Opportunities Dashboard which provides an insight into the count and revenue with various viewpoints.
One you have produced customer experience analytics for all metrics, you will be able to produce a list of recommendations which will enable you to elevate your customer experience.
Conclusion
Customer experience is all about how end customers perceive what is delivered to them and if they are happy to continue to trust the service provided to them. Success will follow if you understand the gaps revealed by your data insights and complete the recommendations list.
Analytics tools allow organisations to gain insights into the data about their customers. Furthermore, this data can be leveraged with use of artificial intelligence technology into predicting future trends and be ahead of the curve.
Ashine Consultancy Solutions provides industry-leading advice on Customer Experience Strategy. For bespoke Customer Portal solutions, data management solutions, business process automation, custom software development, website development, mobile app development and other bespoke software solutions to improve your customer experience (CX), get in touch for a free consultation.
