Topic: The 5 Customer Satisfaction Metrics You Can Track for a Boost to ROI

Prioritizing customer satisfaction starts with your call center and ends with higher revenue for your entire organization. Turns out, more than two-thirds of companies with growing revenue prioritize customer satisfaction, compared to only 49% of companies with stagnant or decreasing revenue.

But how do you know what takes top priority when it comes to improving customer satisfaction? These days, customers seem to want it all. They want fast service. And they want accurate service, too. They want answers to their problems now, but they also want jovial agents who know how to talk small.

Just last week, I had an agent tell me about her puppy who’s currently in his rebellious teenage years. I could tell she had a grin from ear to ear while talking about it, and it made me smile. Oh, and she also promptly solved my problem. That’s the kind of service modern customers expect every time.

5 Metrics to Understand then Improve Customer Satisfaction for Better ROI

1. Customer Effort Score

Last week our sales and marketing team had a chat with a team member from Centricity, one of our clients here at Sharpen. He sees the contact center moving from a transactional department to one that’s solutions-oriented and insight-driven. And to reach that next milestone in customer experience, Centricity is laser-focused on customer effort. They’re trying to understand how much effort their customers put in to solve a problem. And, they’re nailing down the tools they can use to better understand, then improve that level of effort.

Why?

Because customer effort predicts customer loyalty. Customers who have to put in a ton of effort, like repeating their issue over and over or reaching out three times for help, are the quickest to churn. In fact, 96% of customers have churned after a high-effort experience with a company.

Measuring CES helps you keep a watch on this dangerous trend. Often, it’s measured with a single question in a customer survey: “How easy was it for you to resolve your problem today?” You offer a scale from 1-10 for customers to rank the ease of their experience. Then, based on the surveys, you calculate an average “effort” score.

But truth be told, surveys alone can give you a narrow view of your customer experience. It’s easy for customers to be a bit dishonest, and it’s even easier to opt-out and not share feedback at all. So, in addition to asking your customers directly, dig into your behavioral data, too. Look at other metrics like your hold times, handle times, and active contact resolution to see how much time customers spend trying to solve a problem. And, keep a close eye on churn data to see how those metrics create (or eliminate) more churn.

Topic Discussed: The 5 Customer Satisfaction Metrics You Can Track for a Boost to ROI

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