Measuring success in customer experience

Measuring success in CX transformation

Customer experience (CX) transformation has been one of the top agendas for today’s CXOs.

That has been broadened to also include the concept of total experience (TX) transformation which focuses on partners, suppliers, and employees besides customers. Gartner estimates that by 2024, organizations providing a total experience will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both customer and employee experience. There are a plethora of tools and platforms that facilitate measurement techniques. The specific approach to effectively measure success and outcomes from CX initiatives, however, remains a tricky area to navigate, more so in the B2B world of manufacturing and industrial technology companies. While there is no silver bullet answer to this dilemma, lessons learned from successful CX transformations can be a foundational framework for success.

Strategic measures

Organizations embracing for TX strategy need to define appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) according to their industry, competition, and geography.

KPIs like customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), customer lifetime value (CLTV), customer retention, and revenue growth are well-established indicators of success. In many B2B enterprises, net promotor Score card (NPS) is considered a broad measure to evaluate customer satisfaction benchmark and has been adopted as an indicator of an organization’s propensity to strengthen client relationship. While these measures are critical enablers in quantifying strategic impact, they are not sufficient in silos and need to be augmented with the relevant operational measures to provide a consolidated and more actionable barometer for experience.

Operational measures

In addition to NPS, digital transformation initiatives directly impact a regular day in the life of B2B customers, partners, and employees.

These impacts factor in touchpoints across the user journey and can be thought in terms of:

Transactional impact

Aspects like ease of interaction, speed and conversion rates can be considered for CX initiative targeted towards enhancing transactional effectiveness. For example, for a CX intervention centered around launching an equipment or parts marketplace, measures like order cycle time can be used as a direct indicator of value from a customer standpoint. This will highlight the increase in productivity compared to the traditional offline ordering process prevalent in the industrial manufacturing sector. Additionally, impact on measures like order volume or Order Book Value (OBV) can indicate whether the initiative has accelerated the organization’s growth priorities.

Customer service impact

As in the case of B2C ecosystem, customer service driven by call-center models and traditional call resolution metrics remain relevant. However, the industrial manufacturing sector has gravitated to self-service features such as unified customer portals and digital assistants which have become key expectations for customers and end users today. As a result, call deflection indicators and self-service satisfaction metrics provide a strong measure of success. Often these measures are easier to quantify, based on the availability of data from digital analytics, compared to historic data from support requests and full-time employees (FTE) effort spent in servicing them.

Adoption and engagement impact

Unless specifically addressed upfront, adoption has always been a key challenge for many CX transformation initiatives. Measures around user access and user stickiness such as login counts, login frequency, login duration, and feature usage are some of the key indicators to measure the effectiveness of CX programs from an adoption lens. Although trailing the B2C world, industrial majors are starting to experiment with digital usage analytics tools and models to collect this data and drive future initiatives.

Bringing it all together – a consolidated CX score

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the CX measurement problem.

However, following a structured approach – as highlighted below – an organization can significantly improve success rates.

Baseline - Establish a baseline for all key metrics, both strategic and operational. In the absence of data, consider using consensus on extrapolated baseline values.

Contextualize - Apply suitable weights to the KPIs based on business strategy. For example, certain geographies or product lines may be of higher strategic value, and hence assigned higher weightage, customer segmentation, customer value, and so on.

Measure - Progressively measure the KPI after every CX intervention increment.

Feedback - Establish a feedback loop into future iterations of CX transformation.

Adoption of a consolidated CX score approach provides an effective view of the impact of CX interventions from the lens of the enterprise, customer, and operational touchpoints. That helps to establish a feedback loop which will inform and guide future decision-making and investments in the CX continuum for B2B industrial manufacturing companies.