Our recent CX Grand Slam Webinar Series is a four-part event loaded with insights from industry experts. In the second episode, Building Continuous CX Improvements in Your Contact Center, Nate Brown, co-founder of CX Accelerator, shared his expertise regarding how to build an all-star contact center. As a follow up, Mr. Brown has provided input into the following Questions and Answers:
1) Please translate the "Metrics" acronyms – CES, NPS, Churn Rate, LTV and EX, and how these help lead to continual improvement.
It is tempting to wait to establish a metrics set until changes have already started happening. This will likely hurt you in the end, as it’s critical to know if your changes are having the desired on CX or not! By first establishing a good baseline of metrics, you can stop making assumptions in the area of continual improvement, and move forward with confidence knowing which improvements carry the most return. These metrics below are a wonderful starting point. Depending on your customers and what their journey looks like, other data points will be needed to supplement.
- CES - The Customer Effort Score was introduced by the CEB (now Gartner) in 2013. According to extensive research by a variety of firms, CES has a powerful correlation to customer loyalty. The “effort” question would be asked on your surveys and is simply “how quickly and easily were you able to resolve your issue.” It’s more transactional when compared with NPS, and is great for measuring the experience on a touch point by touch point basis.
- NPS – Net Promotor Score has been helping companies understand customer perceptions long before Customer Experience was even a mainstream function. Introduced by Fred Reichheld, Net Promoter Score is calculated on a 10 point scale by asking “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” The goal is to turn “detractors” into “promoters” under the assumption that promoters will help you to generate more business and spend more with your brand over time.
- Churn Rate - For subscription-based services, this is the percentage of customers who discontinue service in a given period of time. Used commonly in SaaS (Software as a Service) business and is also referred to as the “rate of attrition."
- Lifetime Value (LTV, CTLV or CLV) - A predictive measure of how much an organization can expect a customer to spend with them over the course of their entire relationship.
- Employee Experience (EX) - How employees perceive their total interactions with an organization. Can be measured using “total motivation score” or a number of other methods.
2) It's an interesting challenge to really ensure that internal customer priorities are actually linked to bottom line external customer priorities/benefits. Bell and whistles are just noise if they're not fully focused (and sometimes questioned). Suggestions?
This is an excellent truth to realize early. In order to make CX a lasting priority in the organization, there must be a clear association back to meaningful outcomes. Creating a CX dashboard is a first step. Show how incremental improvements to both the customer and the employee experience can have a major positive impact on revenue. Even easier to calculate is the impact of a diminishing customer experience on revenue. Guides like this one from Harvard Business review can help you to get started. One additional tip would be to avoid doing CX in a vacuum. Many organizations hire a CX team and more-or-less wipe their hands of any additional responsibly, happy to let these chosen few direct the effort. While it does require dedicated leadership, everyone in the organization needs to play a role in improving CX. If you build it into the fiber of the culture, starting with on-boarding, you are building a foundation that cannot be erased when quarterly priorities shift.
3) What are those community CX resources you recommend?
There are a number of wonderful CX-related communities out there, and the great thing is that most of them are free. You can find a wealth of information from blogs (like this one) and contact center-related websites.
If you're interested in learning more about analyzing processes, measuring results and taking your contact center to the next level, this webinar is for you. A recording of it is available here. Tune in and begin transforming your contact center today.
