The Blind Spots of Traditional CX Metrics in Measuring Customer Experience

Customer experience is one the top of the priority list of all businesses. After all, the better the customer experience, the better the company's performance. It's the secret ingredient for a successful brand. Its a crucial aspect of any business, as it can have a significant impact on customer loyalty, retention, and overall satisfaction.

To assess CX, companies often rely on traditional metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer Effort Score, and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores. These metrics provide a snapshot of how customers feel about their experience with a company, and are generally easy to collect and analyze.

However, there are several limitations to these customer experience metrics that make them insufficient in providing a complete understanding of the reasons behind changes in CX.

1. Not Granular Enough

The limitation that traditional customer journey metrics, such as NPS and CSAT, are "not granular enough" means that they do not provide detailed information on specific pain points or areas for improvement within the customer experience. These metrics provide a general overview of how customers feel about their experience but do not delve into the specific aspects of the experience that need improvement.

CX metrics are often too broad and lack the depth necessary to understand why the customer experience is not performing well. The lack of insights makes it challenging to identify the specific pain points that customers face, making it difficult to take effective action to improve the customer experience measurement.

For example, a low NPS score may indicate that customers are generally dissatisfied with the experience, but it does not reveal the specific areas where customers are experiencing difficulties or frustrations. This lack of detail makes it difficult for companies to identify the specific areas that need improvement and implement changes that will make a meaningful impact on the customer experience.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, companies need to supplement traditional CX metrics with other methods, such as conducting customer surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews and analyzing customer reviews and feedback. These methods can provide more granular information on specific pain points and areas for improvement, allowing companies to make targeted and effective improvements to the customer experience.

2. No Continuous Assessment of ‘Whys’

Remember something dear to you in your childhood? Now, you can no longer look at it because you grew out of it. Well, your customers behave the same.

Their preferences change with time. And if you are not able to assess CX continuously, you will fail to identify the ‘whys’. Contrary, if a company can give great experiences throughout the customer journey, 65% of respondents will become long-term consumers.

Generally, the CX team collects and analyzes the CX metrics on a periodic basis to measure customer experience. However, this approach can lead to a delay in identifying and addressing issues with the customer experience.

And the root cause of declining CX may have changed by the time the customer metrics are collected and analyzed, making addressing the issue more difficult.

Imagine you run a toy store, and you collect customer satisfaction metrics on a quarterly basis. During the first quarter, the customer satisfaction score was high. But by the second quarter, it declined significantly. You analyze the key metrics and identify that the main reason for the decline is long wait times in the checkout line.

However, by the time you take action to address the issue, customer preferences have changed. And your customers are not much bothered by the long waiting times in the checkout line.

How should you handle this? The easiest way to tackle this problem is by adapting a continuous assessment of customer feedback, customer satisfaction studies, and the "whys" behind customer dissatisfaction. You can take the help of real-time customer feedback tools, such as surveys or live chat, to understand customer preferences and needs as they change.

The toy store could, for example, could survey customers in real-time while waiting in line or use live chat to provide immediate assistance to customers with questions or concerns.

3. Irrelevant/Incomplete Data Sources for Customer Journey

Customers stretch miles when buying a product. They research their products from social media to reviews and trials before buying a product from countless sources.

Similarly, the CX team breaks a sweat in finding out more about their potential customers. From surveys to complaints, they collate data from multiple sources and analyze them thoroughly to get more insights into the customer experience.

Picking the right sources is essential because you will derive the wrong insights if your data is wrong. Unfortunately, traditional CX metrics often rely on limited data sources, such as customer surveys or complaints, which can result in an incomplete picture of:

Customer interactions
Customer sentiment
Customer expectations
Customer preferences
Customer needs
Voice of the customer

To ensure a more comprehensive picture of the customer experience is captured, you should use multiple data sources to fetch customer data. This could include customer surveys, social media, online reviews, and customer interactions with your brand.

The toy store could, for example, conduct regular surveys to measure customer satisfaction, monitor social media for customer feedback, and analyze online reviews to identify trends and patterns.

4. No Holistic Picture of Customer Satisfaction

When measuring customer experience, existing systems with traditional CX metrics focus on isolated elements of the customer experience, such as customer satisfaction or product quality. As a result, they miss the bigger picture of how all the elements of the customer experience come together. This can prevent you from understanding the poor performance of CX.

Let's go back to the example of a toy store. To measure CX, the business measures customer satisfaction solely through customer surveys. However, even though customer satisfaction is a significant aspect of the customer experience, it may not fully reveal why a customer is unhappy with a product.

There could be multiple reasons: poor design, lack of functionality, or difficulty using the product. To find out the exact reasons, you need to consider all the elements of the customer experience, not just customer satisfaction.

These elements could include product design, functionality, ease of use, customer journey, customer service, and post-purchase support. By considering the full customer experience, you can better understand why a customer is dissatisfied and take effective action to improve it.

5. Customer Journey Metrics Can be Biased

CX metrics are influenced by various factors that can lead to bias. These factors could include how the data is collected, the timing of the data collection, or the sample size. Biased metrics can lead to a skewed understanding of the customer experience and prevent businesses from taking effective action to improve it.

The toy store owner measures customer satisfaction through customer surveys in the above example. However, if the survey is only sent to a small number of customers who have recently had a negative experience, it may not accurately reflect the overall customer experience.

That's because the sample size may be too small to represent the entire customer base. And the timing of the survey may not accurately reflect the customer's overall experience with the brand.

To avoid bias in your CX metrics, you need to ensure that you are using a representative sample of your customer base and are collecting data at regular intervals from multiple data sources, such as customer feedback, customer interactions with the brand, and social media.

This will provide a more comprehensive and accurate picture of the customer experience and enable businesses to take effective action to improve it.

6. Can Provide Outdated Data Because Of Delay In Analysis

Traditional CX metrics can take significant time to analyze and report on. As a result, the data may be outdated when it is analyzed. This can make it difficult to take prompt and effective action to improve the customer experience in a rapidly changing customer landscape.

For example, online retailers track website traffic and conversion rates. They may collect data daily and analyze it on a weekly basis to identify trends and make improvements to the website.

However, because of a sudden shift in customer behavior or an unexpected change in the market, the data collected and analyzed on a weekly basis fails to accurately reflect the current state of the customer experience.

By the time the retailers analyze the data and take action to address any issues, the cause of the decline in conversion rates may not be the same, making it more difficult for the CX team to handle the issue.

Wrap-Up: Measuring Customer Journeys & Experiences

CX management and measurement metrics are essential in understanding the performance of customers' experience well. But all businesses should remember that metrics aren't always an accurate reflection of customer experience. Instead, they may provide a limited and flawed understanding of the customer experience.

We discussed some reasons that could be responsible for stagnant or declining customer experiences - which traditional metrics fail to tell. These metrics may be too broad, lacking in depth and granularity, leading to a lack of insight into the specific pain points of the customer journey. Or, you might be using irrelevant or incomplete data sources, such as customer surveys or complaints, in computing your customer experience.

To estimate customer experience, businesses should take a consolidated approach and develop a hierarchy of metrics - rather than relying on a top metric, and measure CX on what your customers care about. Also, don't forget to focus on the customer experience team because happy customers result from happy employees.

The Blind Spots of Traditional CX Metrics in Measuring Customer Experience

Do you know what your customers really want?

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