Without a solid digital customer experience (CX) in place, you can say goodbye to your loyal consumers. Your customers won’t stay in business with your company if interactions are not an easy and pleasant experience. But the only way to learn if your current customer experience is successful is by implementing proper reporting procedures on the right kind of metrics.

 We’ll cover all of that and more in the following sections:

• Top Customer Experience Metrics to Report On
• How Data Improves the Digital Customer Experience
• Top 7 Tips for Reporting CX Data

Top Customer Experience Metrics to Report On

Before you can report on your digital customer experience, your team needs to decide which metrics to keep tabs on. While each metric is valuable in its own way, they all serve their own purpose. It’s important to choose the metrics that will best serve your business’s long-term strategies. Here are just a few metrics to consider. 

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) — This metric is an important, general number to keep track of, as it gauges how satisfied your customers are with your products, services, and processes. This metric is usually captured by asking the customer to rate you on a scale from “Very Satisfied” to “Not at All Satisfied.” 

Customer Churn Rate — This metric refers to how often your company loses customers. But if those customer relationships are solid, they’re more likely to continue to use your product or service. That means that keeping this number high is hugely valuable to your business. You can calculate this by dividing the number of customers lost over a period by the total number at the beginning of that period.  

Website Visitor Intent — This metric measures why customers visit your website, as opposed to how they got there or how long they stayed. When you understand why customers visit your website, you can ensure that you’re providing them with the content and information they really want.

Customer Effort Score (CES) — As we’ve previously written, this metric is newer to the customer experience space. This metric focuses on a customer’s interaction with your business. This interaction can range from finding a product on your website to solving a post-purchase service issue.

Related: 10 Tips for Creating a Great Customer Experience Programme

How Data Improves the Digital Customer Experience

As we previously reported, data is a vital part of improving the customer experience. Your customers’ interactions with your brand will make or break your organisation’s online reputation. The best way to make sure you provide a tailor-made experience lies in customer data. Here are a few ways your organisation can use data to improve the customer experience:

• Mapping the customer journey — Creating a customer journey map allows you to see where your customers are experiencing frustrations with your brand. This gets you a comprehensive view of the digital channels, including mobile apps, your consumers take to interact with your brand, and their behavioural data across every touchpoint in the customer journey. With information on each touchpoint, you’ll have an opportunity to delight them further. 
• Customer surveys — Having your customer service team send out surveys to your customers on a regular basis is a straightforward way to collect data, as you can directly ask consumers how you’re doing. 

Keep in mind that you should pose your survey questions in a way that allows you to collect actionable insights that allow you to make positive changes within your business. You also need to ensure you’re using the correct type of customer experience survey for the right occasion. Here are a few examples:

• Customer Satisfaction Surveys — Your customer support team can send questionnaires in order to find out if your product or services live up to customers’ expectations.
• Market Research Surveys — These surveys tell you how and where consumers are purchasing your products.
• Brand Awareness Surveys — This gauges brand awareness within your targeted customer demographic.
• Event Evaluation Surveys — These questionnaires are a great way to find out your event attendees’ thoughts on the experience.
• Net Promoter Score Survey — A  one-question Net Promoter Score survey simply asks your customers how likely they are to recommend your business to others.
• Reputation Score management — Your Reputation Score is a collection of everything that’s being said about your brand online. Digging into your score can provide you with unique insight into company weaknesses that may be preventing you from satisfying your customers.

Reputation’s data-driven solutions give you a robust view of how customers perceive your brand and what they’re saying about it. That view is shown through one centralised interface, meaning that you can use it to drive positive reviews, implement company improvements and receive higher ratings. 

Related: 12 Tips for Customer Experience Survey Design

Top 7 Tips for Reporting CX Data

Your team needs a well-thought-out customer experience strategy for reporting on your organisation’s CX data in order to implement digital transformation. Your team needs to keep these tips in mind as you’re getting started with reporting on CX data.  

1. Tailor real-time dashboards to the correct persona. As specific metrics apply to specific organisations, be sure to show the right customers what they need to know. How are they doing? Are the metrics on those dashboards getting better or worse over time? What should they focus on?
2. Make sure your reports are based on robust data. Use monthly or quarterly time periods if responses are low to ensure decisions are not based on a few pieces of customer feedback. Provide training to report users and or indicators within reporting to distinguish normal variability from significant changes or trends.
3. Pull feedback from multiple sources. One source isn’t good enough for adequate customer feedback. You need to analyse reviews, survey responses, and comments on social media to truly understand what customers are saying about your business. 
4. Share actions you take with customers. You should tell your customers what you have done with the feedback, along with sharing those results. This will show your target audience that you are dedicated to constantly improving the customer experience, which will subsequently strengthen your customer base.
5. Make it easy for users to access feedback results. Utilise apps that provide immediate notification on closing the loop and action that needs to be taken. Email weekly results into stakeholders’ inbox every week. This will show your customers that you value their feedback.
6. Make real change. Ensure quarterly programme governance to drive action from the results. What are departments doing to proactively improve the experience? Start each session with a recap on actions from the previous quarter.
7. Identify quick wins. When analysing feedback from your CX strategy, can you identify any quick wins? Your team members should figure out which specific day of the week scores the worst. What are the best locations doing differently from the worst? Which key measures impact the outcome questions?   

If you need more help with your digital customer experience strategy, please feel free to reach out to our customer experience team. Reputation has years of experience guiding customers through this process. Of course, you can always feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn as well.