A customer experience evaluation KPI supports action. Each KPI chosen must respond to at least two concerns to be truly operational:
Measure an important dimension from the customers' point of view,
Correspond to at least one lever directly actionable by the employees whose action is evaluated.
Here are some comparative elements of four forms of customer experience KPIs: Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, loyalty/repurchase intention, satisfaction.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
This involves evaluating the recommendation intention “Would you recommend [Company/Brand] to [your friends/colleagues» as a proxy for an evaluation of the quality of the experience.
Advantages of this type of KPI:
It embodies the recommendation intention which reflects the level of predisposition (favorable or unfavorable) of the customer towards the company or the brand and lends itself well to a strategic synthesis of the general health of the customer experience,
It is known to everyone (because it is the subject of numerous publications, communications and discussions).
Boundaries :
Its variations are often difficult to explain if we do not have other more precise and operational KPIs. Thus, it cannot constitute the “single indicator” of the customer experience,
There are certain categories for which the principle of “recommendation” appears unrealistic,
Contrary to appearances, it does not measure the “word of mouth” because when we ask the question “When was the last time you recommended XXX», the results are often very… surprising compared to the NPS!
The intention of loyalty
A bit like theNPS, loyalty intention is a metric measuring a level of engagement with a company or brand.
Advantage of this type of KPI:
The principle of loyalty is easy for the customer to understand and he can therefore easily answer this question if the product/service category lends itself to it,
It constitutes a very transversal indicator which intends to project the future of the relationship.
Disadvantages:
The notion of loyalty is not always obvious depending on the product or service category. Particularly depending on the renewal rate of the product/service we are talking about, but also because in certain cases the customer experience is not linked to a single brand, the notion of loyalty is then poorly suited (we will then rather speak of repurchase intention),
In B2B in particular, the notion of loyalty can be difficult to understand when the user is not the decision-maker on the choice of a service provider or the solution.
Satisfaction
Let’s instead talk about “the” satisfactions. Because we will distinguish between the “overall satisfaction” which will be asked to summarize the entire experience and the “detailed, specific satisfactions” which will question certain dimensions of the experience (“the availability of the interlocutors”, “the listening ability of the advisors”, “the quality of the product/service”), etc.
Advantage of this type of KPI:
Once we integrate “detailed satisfaction”, the evaluation of the customer experience becomes very operational for the teams having to implement action plans,
It is easy for a customer to express themselves because the notion of satisfaction corresponds well to everyday language.
Boundaries :
Satisfaction is a feeling, which varies from one customer to another even when they are exposed to an identical experience. Also, its subjective side can pose a problem and requires, for example, cross-referencing “the processing time of your request” with the actual processing time as observed in the IS, or being supplemented by the Customer Effort Score,
Faced with a large number of satisfaction questions in the same questionnaire, a “halo” effect can transversally impact the way in which customers express themselves on each of the indicators, an effect that must then often be treated statistically to better discriminate the performance of each of the dimensions.
Customer Effort Score
The Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the level of effort that a customer had to deploy to be satisfied with an aspect of their relationship. Advantage of this type of KPI:
Measuring satisfaction with a “request for information” will inevitably combine substantive dimensions (the ability to concretely obtain the expected information) and a relational dimension (such as the “friendliness of the interlocutor”, whatever their ability to address the request). Also where “satisfaction” can leave an area of ambiguity linked to the impact of relationships (which it is of course fundamental to capture), the measurement of perceived effort (which focuses on the customer, and not on their interlocutor) makes it possible to complete the measurement with KPIs which are significantly more objective.
Disadvantages:
The CES and its notion of effort is not always easy for a customer to understand,
The notion of effort does not always make sense in all customer experience measurements,
The CES can only be applied to a specific process, a contact in which the customer is an “actor”, it therefore cannot measure all aspects of the relationship, in particular incoming contacts or interactions of which he is not instigator.
Ultimately, when choosing KPIs, you must know how to resist two temptations:
Try to summarize the customer experience in a single indicator that we would have measured. This would make no more sense than prescribing in medicine a single unique analysis to deduce the general health of a patient...
Give in to the KPI fashion of the moment. Note that each time a new KPI appears, it claims to replace the previous ones... (this was the case for NPS with regard to satisfaction, but also for CES with regard to NPS, etc...). A KPI is a tool, and when considered closely it is indicated in certain situations, contraindicated in others. The diagnosis must be based on the fashion effect. Because giving in to the fashion of a KPI without making a prior diagnosis will inevitably expose teams - from the second or third wave of KPI communication - to inextricable problems of understanding the reasons for downward or upward variation of a poorly adapted KPI.
Also the choice of KPI should only be made after a precise examination of the objectives and the advantages and limits of each of them. It is generally a good mix of the three which allows you to have an operational customer experience evaluation instrument. A “new KPI” should not be seen in principle as a tool that cancels and replaces previous KPIs, but as an additional instrument that can have its place in the toolbox.