Traditional metrics don’t tell the full story behind outsourced CX. Use these simple (but often overlooked) measures to better understand your BPO customer service.
3 (and a half) customer service metrics you’re not measuring (but probably should be)
For ambitious disruptor companies, customer service is a core part of sustaining an upward trajectory—for business growth and brand.
So it’s crucial to understand the minutiae of your customer journey—from the seamless and intuitive parts to the friction points hindering your customer experience management and, ultimately, your customer satisfaction and retention.
So what metrics should BPO providers use to draw out CX insights from the big picture and the nitty-gritty?
Net Promoter Score (the likelihood of a customer recommending your company on a scale of 0 to 100) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT on a scale of 0 to 5 or similar) are the most common.
The trouble is, both of these metrics are limited in what they can tell you. Normally, only a sliver of your customer base responds to these surveys.
So while you get some indication of high-level progress, they fall well short when it comes to deeper insights that account for the entire customer journey.
Here are some less popular but highly valuable customer experience metrics that can help you build a deeper understanding of that journey (and more importantly, turn those insights into better customer experiences.)
1. Customer Effort Score
Customer Effort Score (CES) is simply how easy it is for your customers to solve a problem.
In a time when we’ve come to expect instant results, CES has become more and more relevant to overall customer satisfaction and retention.
CES is invaluable for surfacing obstacles that prevent an effortless customer journey—and the results of getting it wrong can have a huge impact on brand perception.
94%
of customers who had an effortless experience are likely to make a second purchase
4%
of customers who have to exert a high level of effort are likely to make another purchase
81%
of customers forced into a high level of effort are likely to share their bad experiences with friends
1%
only 1% of those who went through an effortless experience will share it with friends or family
Having a low CES may not win you new customers—but it can help you keep them. By reducing friction across the customer journey, you’ll start building up a surplus of customer goodwill.
2. Referral Rate
As a challenger company, brand equity tends to be in short supply. A lot of what you’re doing is new—you’re trying to uproot the status quo and carve out a new niche with an occupancy of one.
That’s scary for a lot of folks.
And it’s why the first batch of customers often join your new and bold venture on the recommendations of those already on the journey with you.
Referral rate helps you measure how often your existing customers bring you potential new business.
When you have a sense of how willing your customers are to connect you to prospects, you can start to interrogate your CX capability as a whole.
If a customer has been with you for a year and is unwilling (or even just hesitant) to recommend you to others, something is wrong. And, you can start a process of unearthing the issues giving your customers pause.
Referral rate can help you unlock real CX issues quickly, so you can focus your energy on better customer experience management that satisfies current customers and attracts new business.
3. Employee Satisfaction
You won’t be surprised to hear that employees with deeper job satisfaction provide better customer experiences.
Yet it’s rare that employee culture is given the same amount of attention as the customers they serve.
That’s why advanced customer service agents work with a purposeful mindset. Employees with a sense of responsibility deliver a brand of authentic CX that can’t be faked.
It’s up to your BPO provider to foster and sustain that sense of purpose.
And by treating employee satisfaction as a key metric, you can find tangible points of improvement and make the right moves to boost internal engagement.
Define a clear, pithy common purpose that directly influences customer interactions—then measure and share the relevant metrics to key customer journeys.
Consistently share customer feedback and uncover the root causes of problems. When you do this, the customer experience becomes a self-improving, flexible and relentless growth-driver.
When you measure your employees’ sense of purpose, your CX becomes purposeful—both for harnessing customer loyalty and keeping your bottom line sweet.
3.5 Define your version of success
OK, so this isn’t technically a metric—but it is the context you’ll measure all your metrics against. Because without a clear endgame, you’ll likely end up wasting resources by measuring the wrong aspects of the customer journey.
That’s why advanced BPO providers help their partners draw the clearest possible picture of customer behaviors across the user journey.
What bigger strategic outcomes is the journey in service of? What does success look like in your corner of the world?
Once you can answer those questions, you can prioritize the moves you want to make (and measure) with clarity and conviction.
And when you understand the final destination, you can align and hone the discrete parts of your CX capability to flow toward it.
Then you can identify, prioritize and measure the most important journeys that lead to better customer experiences and business growth.
Ubiquity can help you transform your CX.
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