At Adexchange, we say there’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to measuring customer experience. Whilst we do work with CSAT surveys and NPS results, we encourage our clients not to lean entirely on their findings. Instead, we shamelessly suggest nerding out on data.
For the hardcore CSAT and NPS loyalists, here’s why:
1. Wide Vs Macro Lens
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Surveys and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are great for providing tasty soundbites and sweeping statements about a customer’s experience. From gushing scores of commitment to odes of crushing disappointment, we really do get the picture with CSAT and NPS scores. But, under the scrutiny of a macro lens, that image often pixelates.
Even if a survey’s questions are laser-focused, CSAT and NPS scores can remain nebulous. They don’t lend themselves to geeky specifics like touchpoints and transfer times, like data labels do. An element of translation is therefore needed to link NPS and CSAT results back to the architecture of customer journeys. Data, on the other hand, maps us back to these journeys brick by brick. As 77% of customers think outstanding customer service is the main factor in earning brand loyalty (Zendesk), these bricks are important to be able to identify.
Its specificity means that data offers a deep dive into why something does or doesn’t work. If transfer times are looking prolific and lengthy, we’ll know exactly how prolific and lengthy. Poor CSAT and NPS results, meanwhile, aren’t always full of clarity. They might not point directly to poor transfer times at first; low scores could be in relation to failing self-service tools, vague agents, or just a terrible Tuesday for Javi (more on that later). If these surveys and scores aren’t crystal clear, they can send us on a wild goose chase.
On the flipside, it’s highly likely data relating to slow transfer times will also correlate with poor CSAT or NPS results – making it a more comprehensive analytics tool.
As contact centre managers we should be kitted with both a wide and macro lens through which to view our customer journeys. CSAT and NPS provide a broad outline, but data gives us light and shade when it comes to refining our customers’ experience.
2. Nuance Vs Numbers
“It took me FOREVER to speak to someone, I could have planned my own funeral in the time they took to pick up, and over my dead body will I use your company again!!!” – Javi
….this comment certainly tells a story, namely that Javi has a dark sense of humour. But in a CSAT survey’s open comments section, a statement like this doesn’t tell us how long Javi was actually waiting on the phone before it was answered. Because ultimately, none of us know how long Javi would take to plan his own funeral.
Whereas data would let us know if “FOREVER” is 45 seconds or more like 45 minutes. If it was the former, we could deduce whether Javi is wildly impatient or justifiably musing his mortality by looking at other touchpoints in his customer journey. If he’s already tried to find answers online, before penning an angry email and eventually calling us, it’s no wonder that he felt he’d been on his journey long enough to choose some hymns.
Data gives customer pinch-points objective and real-time context, where CSAT surveys and NPS give subjective snapshots. With data, we can look at the exact reasons that a customer is successful or not in having their queries answered, and how quickly or slowly they reach a solution.
3. Good News vs Bad News
If one customer says they’ll never recommend our brand to a friend, and the other says they’ll sign everyone they know up, this isn’t an automatic reflection of our customer journeys. In some cases, it just means one customer got bad news, whilst the other got lucky. Aka, factors external to customer experience.
For example: a customer is trying to book their laptop in for a free repair service but is refused on the grounds that their product is outside warranty.
This is more likely to lead to a small tantrum than a high customer satisfaction score. In fact, the NPS interface is an ideally placed emotional punch bag for such news. The score will therefore likely not be a reflection of the customer journey itself, but of Jim’s evening realising his keyboard will be missing the letter ‘P’ for the foreseeable. The agent who delivered this blow may well have provided efficient service and accurate information. But they won’t hear about it, especially if Jim had coincidentally also been dumped earlier that day.
On the flipside: an agent tells a customer that they qualify for a brand-new laptop free of charge.
In this situation, we’re likely to receive overtures of euphoric relief in our NPS. We may even accrue a voluntary influencer who sings our praises to everyone in Woking. This person, high on the joys of spring and a keyboard refurb, may have no recollection that their agent was a bit pedestrian and that our website FAQs hadn’t even vaguely answered their question on an initial investigation.
Data, on the other hand, can focus on the specifics of customer service in order to sculpt customer journeys. This is infinitely more useful than the politics of company refund and repair policies, or simply how a customer’s day might be going. Data can shed light on targeted questions like:
How many of our contacts were sorted the first time?
Are our app’s self-help tools meaning that fewer phone calls are being made to resolve these queries?
How many people reached the right agent first-time around?
These kinds of questions are arguably a more robust measure of our customer experience – than the extremities of human emotions, including a Wednesday that’s gone west for personal reasons.
4. Voluntary vs Guaranteed Information
Let us not forget you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. CSAT surveys and NPS are all given to us at the customer’s discretion, which means we’re often receiving a skewed pool of data. Typically, really delighted or really hacked off customers will fill these babies out. Somewhere between just 5%-35% (Delighted.com) of all customers tend to fill out CSATS, and just 15-30% (Perceptive.co.nz) respond to NPS. It ain’t much.
Data, on the other hand, is wholly inclusive. It takes into consideration everyone who makes contact with us and monitors their experience. Which means data offers a democratic wide lens, as well as its precise zoom function. Hard win, surely?
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Whether you’re a convert to data-analysis or not doesn’t really matter. At Adexchange, we work with all of these types of feedback to optimise customer journeys, and recognise they complement each other in tandem. If you’re tempted by data though, we understand it’s an intimidating and faffy realm to foray into. The tech available these days means we’re often force-fed avalanches of numbers on a daily basis, and we know you don’t have time for that.
Our job is to sort the riff from the raff, by knowing where to focus (on customer-centric data for example). Your job is to trust us to use these numbers to streamline your customer journeys in a way which creates clear and positive correlations between bombastic CSAT Surveys and NPS, and laser-focused data.
Think of it like a game of battleships: data analysis gives us the precise coordinates to nail those customer journeys and blow those surveys and scores out the water.
