The Power of Customer Experience Analytics: How to Use It to Optimize Your Business Strategy

Whether you sell products or offer SaaS services, customer experience analytics is becoming increasingly important. Satisfied customers result in more money earned – according to research by McKinsey, companies investing in customer experience increased sales revenues by 2 to 7 percent.

By collecting and analyzing data on customer interactions, companies can identify areas of the customer journey that may be causing frustration or dissatisfaction and make improvements to enhance the overall experience.

In this article, we will explore the importance of measuring customer experience analytics and how it can help businesses make informed decisions about their customer-facing strategies.

Customer experience analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing all kinds of data regarding customer engagement. 

With CX analytics, businesses can identify customer pain points, understand customer behavior, and track customer sentiment. Implementing this actionable data can improve product development, marketing, customer service and more. 

Now, let’s examine the key benefits customer experience analytics can offer your business.

There are several reasons why businesses may need to use customer experience (CX) analytics:

• Finding your customer market — you learn where to find your customers and which social media platforms or other channels they use, allowing you to target them better.
• Gathering feedback — communicating directly with your users gives you access to valuable information that lets you improve your products and services precisely in the way your customers expect.
• Looking into your customers’ journey — by tracking the customer behavior on your website, you can identify roadblocks and learn what stops users from converting. You can then make your site more user-friendly to increase conversion rates.
• Identifying areas for improvement — CX analytics can help businesses identify areas of the customer journey that may be causing frustration or dissatisfaction, so they can make improvements to enhance the overall experience.
• Making informed decisions — by collecting and analyzing data on customer interactions, businesses can make more informed decisions about their customer-facing strategies and allocate resources more effectively.

CX analytics can be a powerful tool for improving customer experience, and businesses should take full advantage of it. How to start using it to your advantage?

You need to take several steps to use customer experience analytics successfully. Let’s go through them one by one.

Focus on the proper channels

Most companies use multiple channels to communicate with their audience, but some are always more effective than others. Focus on areas where most of your customers (or potential customers) interact with your brand. This way, you’ll be able to use your time and budget most effectively.

Identify friction points

You also need to find so-called friction points – areas of your entire customer journey that are the most problematic for your customers and negatively affect user engagement and retention. Different people can be irritated by other things, so it’s a good idea to look at different cohorts (groups of users with specific characteristics).

Analyze the data

The next important step is analyzing the information you’ve collected. Look at it from different perspectives, evaluate your metrics, consider metadata, and try to understand customer interactions. The main goal is, of course, to notice trends that you can use to optimize your business processes.

Understand context

If you have problems drawing actionable insights from your CX data, it’s probably a good idea to try to understand the context better. It’s where behavior analytics, and especially customer feedback, can be incredibly useful. You can craft detailed surveys, reach out to your users directly and ask them questions to deepen your knowledge about a particular issue.

Use what you’ve learned

After that, it’s simply a matter of using the data you’ve acquired to implement changes in your products and services. It’s worth pointing out that this is always an ongoing process, and your competition likely does the same – according to IDC, 77% of brands believe CX to be a critical competitive differentiator. You need to monitor your metrics and user journey for potential problems constantly.

Of course, there are many different metrics you can observe and analyze. Let’s go through the most important ones.

Here are seven metrics you should consider tracking during the customer experience analysis process.

1. Average handling time

Average Handling Time (AHT) is an essential metric for customer service performance because it lets you track how long an agent handles a customer request. With this metric, you can determine customer satisfaction levels and evaluate the effectiveness of established protocols.

By tracking AHT, customer service teams can identify areas of improvement and develop strategies to reduce response time. For example, if agents have trouble finding the correct information quickly, management can provide better training or more resources. 

2. First contact resolution

First contact resolution lets you measure how often your team resolves a customer’s issue in a single interaction. Improving FCR is essential to providing a positive customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction.

To calculate FCR, you need to look at the number of inquiries received and those successfully resolved in a single contact. A higher FCR means fewer customers have to contact the company multiple times to resolve their issues, improving customer satisfaction. 

Companies should use CX analytics to measure FCR and identify whether their team resolves customer problems efficiently. 

3. Customer satisfaction score

Customer satisfaction score allows businesses to assess how their customers feel about their product or service. 

A higher CSAT score indicates that customers are happy with their purchase and have had a good experience. On the other hand, a lower score indicates that something needs to be changed to improve customer satisfaction. You usually collect CSAT scores via feedback surveys which you can conduct using many different methods, such as e-mail or live chat. 

The advantage of live chat is that you have a more direct, often real-time contact with the surveyed person, which often allows you to get more in-depth feedback quicker. It also offers a better response rate.  

4. Net promoter score

Net Promoter Score lets businesses measure customer satisfaction. It uses a simple scale to gauge how likely customers are to recommend a company’s products or services to others, which helps you reach more customers. 

Moreover, clients who come from recommendations are more likely to build a lasting relationship with your brand because they have more reasons to trust you.   

To calculate the score, you first ask: “How likely are you to recommend [Company] to a friend or colleague?”. Customers can respond on a scale from 0 to 10, and you divide their responses into three categories: promoters, passives, and detractors. Promoters are customers who score 9-10, passives are those who score 7-8, and detractors are those who score 0-6.

5. Customer churn rate

The customer churn rate measures how many customers leave your company over a certain period. Knowing this rate can help you understand the customer experience, identify customer retention issues, and pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

CX issues you can avoid often cause that churn – according to CallMiner, companies lose $35,3B each year because of such issues.

Tracking customer churn rate allows you to identify patterns and trends that you can use to improve customer experience. For example, you learn which customers are more likely to leave and why, which types of interactions have the best outcomes, and which strategies have the most significant impact on customer loyalty. 

You can make more informed decisions about customer retention, marketing campaigns, and product development by leveraging customer churn rate data. 

6. Customer effort score

Customer effort score (CES) shows how much effort customers have to expend when interacting with your business. 

You show CES on a scale of 1-10, with ten being the most effortful. A CES of seven or higher indicates that customers are frustrated, so your business may need to identify and eliminate the user experience problems they encounter. 

To measure your CES, you’ll need to ask customers to rate their experience. The easiest way to do this is via surveys or online feedback forms. One step further would be analyzing the number of customer support inquiries and social media comments you get, as well as any customer complaints or negative reviews.

7. Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value represents the total value of a customer to a business over their entire relationship with that business. You can calculate the lifetime value by taking the profits generated by a customer and subtracting the cost of acquiring and servicing that customer.

When businesses understand their customers’ total lifetime value, they can decide how to manage their CX programs and investments. 

CLV is the critical metric for unlocking insights about customer behavior and improving the bottom line. With this information, you will know which customers to prioritize and how to optimize pricing and package plans.

Customerly is a behavioral messaging platform that offers a chat feature and a help desk you can integrate with your IT infrastructure. You can use our solution for customer service, optimizing customer satisfaction, and marketing automation — it’s an all-in-one tool that’ll help you on various fronts. 

Here are some deal-breaking features to help you skyrocket your business:

1. Save time and boost engagement with powerful chat features

Customer-centric communication is critical nowadays. Our live chat tool will allow your customers to carry out AI-integrated live conversations with automatic translations (so you’re not limited to English). 

Chat previews and templates for canned responses can help make conversations flow faster and require less effort.

Additionally, our platform offers smart rules to assign conversations automatically based on keywords, user data, or URLs. Your team can also book meetings or demos directly through the chat, which helps resolve customer dilemmas faster.

Customerly allows users to change the visual style of their messages and even attach various files to their responses via a drag & drop system. You can also boost engagement with customizable welcome messages and pre-chat surveys.

Video live chats will make building relations with clients much easier, and non-intrusive screen sharing will help you securely share important information with others.

Take care of your customer service and track customer satisfaction

Customerly offers your users an integrated live chat engagement that allows you to engage with customers at every stage of their buyers’ journey. You can also build a full-featured help center that’ll allow people to find solutions to various problems they might encounter quickly.

These features will reduce the number of incoming tickets and enable your company to address recurring issues efficiently, boosting customer satisfaction.

You can also track your NPS score. Simply choose the questions you want, and segment your user base in various ways to focus on the group you want to, like detractors or your most dedicated fans. Customerly allows you to filter the NPS results however you like, which means you can focus on details or customers that matter in a particular scenario.

Collect and analyze data

Customerly not only gives you access to valuable data but also presents it as reports you can examine. Thanks to this, you can quickly evaluate the performance of your customer service team. Your employees save valuable time and can easily share important information with other stakeholders.

We created the tool with a customer-centric approach because answering your users’ needs is the best way to move your business forward. Try it now!

Customer experience analytics is a powerful tool for companies. It may not be a magic bullet, but it can help you understand your customers better, create a great customer experience, and boost brand loyalty.

By implementing CX analytics, businesses can encourage better decision-making, improve customer engagement and retention, and reach targeted audiences with messages that resonate.

To achieve all that, however, you need to invest in specialized tools. For example, a behavioral messaging platform like Customerly will make communicating with your customer base much more manageable. 

You can use Customerly to create in-chat surveys for end users, which is excellent considering the advantages of this method over feedback conducted through e-mail. Our solution also offers pre-made templates to respond to e-mails, chats, or surveys, which helps save a lot of time. 

The tool will automatically translate chats and allow you to gather all kinds of data during these conversations – you can access all critical information in one place. What’s more, these features are effortless to use too. Want to try them out? Make use of our 14-day free trial by creating an account right now!