What are the Best Methods for Measuring Customer Experience Insights?

Every company wants to put the customer first. Sounds simple, but it’s one of the most difficult things for a business to accomplish.

Measuring customer experience allows companies to better understand the needs of their customers by learning their likes and dislikes along the customer journey. This is important for businesses to improve customer experience and meet KPIs. As an American Express survey found, the majority of buyers will pay more for first-class customer service.

To better understand your customers and improve the quality of your business, learn how to track insights along the entire customer journey.

How to Measure Customer Experience

While there are many methods for measuring customer experience, they won’t all produce the results your business needs to grow. We compared the top five ways businesses measure customer experience to help you build a more customer-centric organization.

Net Promoter Scores (NPS)

An NPS is calculated by asking customers to answer questions using a 0-10 scale. For example, you might ask, how satisfied are you with your experience. Respondents are grouped as promoters (scores 9-10), passives (7-8), and detractors (0-6). The percentage of detractors are subtracted from the percentage of promoters to get your NPS. The higher the NPS, the better the customer experience.

NPS can be a good way to gauge how a recent initiative like a product launch, marketing campaign, or policy change affects brand perception. While they’re easy for both the customer to take and a company to implement, NPS surveys tend to fall short on details and insights. For example, if you were to receive a low NPS, there’s no way of knowing the reasoning behind it nor how to resolve the issue.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT)

CSAT surveys are detailed questionnaires that typically range from five to 10 questions to assess how satisfied customers are with different aspects of your business. Scales are normally used to rate different criteria, such as the friendliness of your employees or the timeliness of the service.

Unlike the broad insights NPS offers, CSAT surveys measure customer experience insights across the customer journey. By using CSAT surveys, companies are able to identify customer experience strengths and failures. However, because these surveys are longer and the questions are more specific, these typically receive very low response rates. There’s also no way to benchmark against competitor or industry performance.

Front-Line Surveys

Front-line surveys are sent immediately following service interactions, asking customers to rate a specific employee’s performance. For low ratings, customers can then select the reasons for their dissatisfaction. For example, after getting a medical exam, a hospital might ask the patient to rate the doctor or nurse’s performance.

Front-line surveys are more personalized than CSATs and typically have higher response rates. They can be good for identifying high and low performers and motivating employees. However, with front-line surveys, there’s limited ability to measure employee compliance with specific brand standards.

Customer Intercepts

A customer intercept involves interviewing customers at the end of their journey. These are typically either conducted in-person outside of a store or on a website in the form of a pop-up ad.

On-the-spot interviews are qualitative and interactive and can be a good way to capture the fine details customers are likely to forget later. However, customer intercepts offer no way to draw larger conclusions about customer experience or brand performance. They also tend to annoy customers, which can lead to an overall bad customer experience.

Mystery Shopping

With mystery shopping, secret shoppers are given a questionnaire that reflects brand priorities and standards and are instructed to follow a script that’s designed to uncover even the smallest sources of friction along the customer journey.

By creating the customer base through secret shoppers, mystery shopping offers the most objective way to measure customer experience. These are paid, educated contractors who know exactly what to look for and can provide thorough insight into a brand. Mystery shopping can be great for challenging organizational assumptions about the customer experience, clarifying expectations and training procedures for staff, identifying top performing employees and franchises, and more.

However, not all mystery shopping companies provide the detailed customer insights needed to improve customer experience. When you work with a mystery shopping company, make sure they’ll not only provide you with a detailed insights report, but also take the time to explain the data and define next steps. Today’s innovative and leading mystery shopping companies can identify specific best and worst practices, prove ROI, and guide you through the data so you understand not just what it means but also how to take meaningful action with it.

Improve Customer Experience

Simply measuring customer experience isn’t enough if you want to see results. Once you have the feedback, whether it’s a low NPS or the results from a mystery shopper checklist, you need to be able to define the next steps to improve customer experience. Many businesses struggle to understand what to do with the results they’re given and, unfortunately, aren’t provided with any guidance to move forward.

Want to improve customer experience? Get the customer insights you need with IntelliShop. From measuring the knowledge and friendliness of your employees to checking for cleanliness to testing new training programs, IntelliShop tracks the entire customer journey to hit on more customer experience metrics. We then present our findings to you in a detailed, actionable insights report to create a strategy that will improve customer experience at your company.

Contact IntelliShop today to request a quote and see how we can help your business improve customer experience.