Customer experience is the foundation of a successful, growing business. Happy customers mean repeat customers, and a positive experience with your brand is crucial to facilitating that.

When it comes to creating a great customer experience, it’s important that you measure your strategy so you can fine-tune it along the way. But measuring happiness isn’t easy — unless you know how.

Read on for four ways that you can measure customer experience success and start finessing your strategy today.

How using surveys can help you glean genuine customer feedback

Surveys are a great way to get a deeper understanding of your customer experience success by going straight to the people that matter — your customers. These surveys can be categorized into two groups: customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.

1. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction surveys are basic questionnaires that highlight customer happiness directly after a specific interaction. For example, once a customer has made a purchase, you would send out an order confirmation email with a thank you, including a short survey for them to complete.

These kind of surveys are great for quickly sourcing customer feedback while their post-transaction satisfaction is at its peak. They provide actionable advice that you can immediately implement.

CSAT surveys are particularly effective at fine-tuning your checkout process, an important factor in creating a positive customer experience. As the transaction is fresh in your customer’s mind, they can highlight potential problem areas so you can address them straight away.

However, while CSAT surveys are good for scrutinizing customer experience in the short-term, they lack the ability to assess longer-term happiness. This is where Net Promoter Scores come in.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The most popular way for brands to measure their overall customer experience success is with a Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is a test used to gauge the strength of your customer relationships.

Where CSAT surveys are geared towards measuring sentiment after a specific purchase or interaction, NPS serves as a benchmark for a customer’s general sentiment towards your brand as a whole.

SurveySparrow’s dedicated NPS Software is great for accurately gauging the success of your customer experience. It’s simple, easy to understand (for both you and your customers), and returns actionable measures that you can implement to enhance your customer experience tenfold.

NPS surveys work in a similar way to CSAT surveys by sending questionnaires to customers. However, rather than focusing on short-term opinions, NPS surveys invite customers to provide opinions on brands as a whole.

For example, customers might be asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely it is that they would recommend your brand to a friend. Rather than sending these out after a specific interaction between your brand and your customer, these are sent at intermittent periods throughout the year. This ensures that your customer’s response is unbiased by a possible recent negative (or positive) interaction.

3. Combine customer responses with actual customer actions

One possible drawback to surveys is that what customers say doesn’t always correlate with what they do. For example, a customer might say that they receive too many marketing emails from your business. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that an increase in such emails actually boosts conversions and engagement.

So when your customer says one thing but does the other, how can you accurately measure customer experience? While bespoke customer responses go a long way towards accurately measuring your customer experience success, they should be used in conjunction with hard data gleaned from your business analytics.

Rather than focusing solely on your survey responses, combine them with your business metrics for a wider, coherent picture of your customer experience.

Continuous mapping of your customer journey throughout the purchase process is a good way to measure this. Monitoring how your customers navigate the sales process, jumping from email to social to your website and so on, lets you build an accurate picture of how they interact with your brand.

Bear in mind your customer responses, but look at how many repeat-purchases your customers make, how many friends they refer, what their average customer lifetime value is, and so on. If there’s a disparity between what they say and what they do, then you should think carefully about where you allocate your effort.

4. Monitor your issue resolution time

The time it takes for you to resolve a customer complaint is a good indicator of your customer experience performance. A relatively long resolution time equates to an unhappy customer, and that has serious implications for your customer experience. 68% of customers point to swift problem resolution as an indicator of positive customer experience, so this matters.

You should already have a ticketing system in place to deal with customer issues. If not, it’s worth looking into — there are lots of affordable customer service tools available that can help with this.

These provide you with hard stats about your customer service performance and can help highlight problem areas that need to be addressed. It can also highlight not just the speed with which a resolution was found, but how satisfied the customer is with that response too.

Customer experience is a crucial part of growing a successful business, as much so as your marketing, products, branding, and so on. As such, it’s important that you take a step back and measure its success to ensure your customer experience is the best it can be!

Follow the tips above, and you’ll be well on your way towards creating a smart customer experience strategy that serves you — and your customers — well into 2019.

Customer Experience Success: 4 Ways To Measure Yours!