Digital Transformation: Customer-Employee Metrics & How They Improve Customer Experience
Digital Transformation Is Not Only Changing The Way Businesses Are Run, But Also The Way Customers And Businesses Interact
How is digital transformation affecting customer experience? Here are a few of the ways that customer experience is being transformed:
TransUnion serves consumers and businesses across multiple lines of business in South Africa and in selected neighbouring states. Operating in a fiercely competitive industry, the organisation is focused on evolving its business from a holding company model with discrete, self-contained business units to an integrated shared services model that is able to support go-to-market activities for each line of business.
- Transferring power back to customer – Where companies would once dictate which channels customers would use to engage with them, businesses are now having to engage with customers on their preferred channel.
- Omnichannel presence – To ensure they are covered, companies need to have a presence on multiple communication channels. No longer is it sufficient to only have a voice support channel. You also need to have email, web chat and social media support channels.
- 24/7 communication channels – Your retail presence may be open nine to five, but your website never sleeps. Customers are increasingly expecting faster response times at all times of day, even if your product may not require extended support hours.
- Mobile gaining prevalence – Smartphones provide the customer with a tool to engage with companies from virtually anywhere at virtually any time. If a product catches a customer’s eye, they can order it immediately from your app. Or, if they receive an order and something is missing, their entire social network will hear about what a poor job your company did.
- Personalised experience – Customers don’t only expect your marketing to be aimed at their specific needs. They expect any interactions with your company to be personalised as well. For example, if a customer calls with a complaint, they don’t want to be run through a scripted interaction covering a wide range of unrelated issues. They want you to get to the heart of their problem.
With all these changes to customer experience, how are modern companies supposed to judge the happiness of their clientele? Thankfully there are a number of metrics that you can use to measure customer satisfaction:
- NPS – The Net Promoter Score (NPS) asks customers to gauge how likely they are to recommend a company, product or service to a friend or colleague using a rating system. The rating is then used to place the customer in one of three categories: Promoters, Passives or Detractors, depending on how they view the company.
- CSAT – Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) asks customers to provide a rating on a product or previous experience with the company.
- CES – Customer Effort Score (CES) asks the customer to rate the effort they need to put into an engagement with the company.
- Churn rate – Churn rate is the number of customers who end their relationship with a company. It is usually associated with subscription services.
- Customer Loyalty Index – The Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) is used to measure how often a customer makes repeat purchases and how positive the experience was, providing a rating answer to three questions.
- Sentiment analytics – Sentiment analysis takes advantage of various technologies, such as machine learning, natural language processing and speech analytics, to identify the emotion behind a piece of communication. This allows you to identify whether a customer has had a positive, neutral or negative experience.
While understanding how customers feel is a key part of improving customer experience, there’s another area that impacts customer experience and customer happiness: employee satisfaction. If an employee is unhappy or dissatisfied it will reflect in their interactions with customers or in their work, which will impact the customer experience.
Here are some metrics that can be used to measure how happy your employees are, regardless of whether they are forward-facing or back-end:
- eNPS – eNPS takes the basic NPS system and tweaks it to address the needs of employees. It asks employees to rate how likely they are to recommend their company as a place to work.
- Absenteeism, Retention and Turnover rate – These three criteria are used to keep track of the number of employees that are absent for a short period (regardless of the motivation), the employees that stay in their positions and those that leave the company over a specific period. Companies with unhappy employees tend to have a high turnover rate.
- Engagement Surveys – Employee engagement surveys are one of the standard methods of measuring employee satisfaction by asking employees various questions relating to their happiness at work.
Regardless of whether you are measuring your customer or employee satisfaction, it’s important to recognise that the score itself is not important unless you have taken the time to ensure it is correctly aligned with your goals
This alignment gives your metrics meaning since they will be directly connected with specific objectives that you are trying to achieve. You also need to ensure that the metrics you choose are suited for the different channels you are using – a metric that is well suited for gauging customer satisfaction on a voice channel may not be a good match for customers who use social media channels.
It’s important to implement systems that allow you to quantify customer experience so that you can identify areas of weakness. If you fail to take steps to identify these problems, you risk neglecting these issues and hurting the growth of your organisation.
Merchants is a customer experience provider who can assist you with the digital transformation of your organisation. Take a look at our customer experience benchmarking report or complete our customer experience assessment to find out how your customer experience compares. Or you can contact us if you require additional information about customer experience and digital transformation.