The business landscape is evolving, with companies becoming increasingly customer centric. This is allowing firms to become better acquainted with their customers and their needs, unlocking hidden potential for businesses to improve their customer experience.
To become truly customer-centric, you need to understand what makes your own customers tick, not just imitate what other firms are doing. This is where customer surveys can help. While it may sound simple, knowing how to design a customer survey is imperative to yielding the information you want from your customer base. An important consideration is which KPI-driving question should lead off your survey. Should we use NPS? Maybe CSAT? How about Effort or Ease?
When building a Voice of the Customer (VoC) survey, it is critical to think about what the objective of that survey is. Ideally, your objective, however you choose to phrase it, will be centred around two key concepts: 1) evidencing actionable insights, and 2) those insights being customer led.
This means that when you’re constructing your survey, it is critical to assess the validity of the questions you’re asking. Does the person on the end of this question understand it, and does it give them the chance to truly reflect how they perceived the experience? Furthermore, does this question require them to make assumptions? For the assumptions, is there a preceding or alternative question that could remove the need for assumptions? If so, shouldn’t we ask that as well or instead? Let’s explore further.
What are CX metrics and why do we need them?
Before delving into the question of “which CX metric should we use?”, we first need to consider whether we’ve validated this question and earned the right to ask it. Most of the time, we haven’t because there are at least two pre-requisite questions to answer:
- What is a metric?
- Why do we need a metric?
My definition of a CX survey metric is ‘an overarching rating that enables the customer to reflect their overall perception and feeling about the whole experience’. The definition ties to the purpose, as the aim is to not bias or lead your respondent. The metric should allow them to think about anything and everything, with focus on whatever they want to focus on, not what you want them to focus on.
As a result, customer survey metrics serve as a pulse for overall performance and can offer direction for further investigative analysis. If you wish to generate customer-led actionability, these provide an important analytical starting point for insight generation. This provides us with the ‘why’ for needing one. However, it is important to note that the metric is not, itself, an insight.
Of course, it can only adequately achieve its aims if the metric – and the question which generates it – is relevant to the experience. When choosing the metric, it is important to understand your audience and consider their potential expectations.
For example, NPS is a CX metric generated by a question about recommendation. I was recently asked this very question by my water supplier – a local monopoly that I have no choice but to use. To whom do they see me making this recommendation? My next-door neighbour, who also has no choice but to use them? My brother, who lives in a different part of the country, so couldn’t use their services even if he wanted to? Choice is a mandatory requirement for recommendation to be valid, and it likely also needs some element of pleasure. If your product is purely functional, or even something of a grudge purchase, under what circumstances do you envisage someone recommending your product? The survey designer’s desire to use metrics like NPS or CSAT should not trump the customer’s ability to either understand the question or to accurately articulate their experience.
To my earlier definition, the customer survey metric should be overarching. For KPIs such as Ease or Effort, ask yourself whether they are all-consuming; do they cover the whole experience or are they missing something? Hopefully, you conclude the latter. The customer intention on most, if not all, interactions is the outcome – problem resolved, product cancelled, etc. – and this is a glaring omission from the already loosely-defined Ease and Effort metrics. The goal of a VoC function is to gain customer insight on what they care about NOT their opinions on what you care about. If you’re still unsure, choose CSAT for your customer experience survey metric. It’s generally the safest option as satisfaction is the least ambiguous concept of the commonly used options, and applies to most situations.
In conclusion, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. To truly become customer-centric, you must aim to understand your own population and their true relationship with your product. You also need to understand why a metric is needed, what each metric is and what it represents, how the question can be interpreted, and how you plan to use it to drive actionable insights.
Need help with your customer surveys? Our consulting team are experts in improving customer experience, and know what questions you need to be asking to find out what makes your customers tick—and what doesn’t. Get in touch today to find out how we can help you find the best CX metrics to measure in your surveys.
