Customer service is essential. All businesses know and understand that, some more than others. The importance of good customer service is highlighted by the fact that most consumers — 94%, to be precise — are likely to make a repeat purchase after a good customer service experience.
Ensuring a decent level of customer service requires monitoring and tracking your current support quality. For that, you need analytics. Customer service is pretty quantitative, although many people assume it to be merely qualitative.
Customer experience analytics tools come in handy when it comes to gauging the quality of customer service. Let's learn about some useful tools and how they help you tap into the minds of your customers.
Customer experience analytics or CX analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing data from various sources to understand the interaction between customers and a business. Simply put, you collect information about your customers' experience with your brand. Then, you use this data to:
You'd think only the product or service you provide defines your company. But that's not true. Your customer service is just as important.
In a Salesforce Research, 88% of consumers said a company's customer service is just as crucial as its offering. That must be correct because all it takes for 61% of customers is one bad experience to switch.
Keeping these findings in mind, customer experience analytics become paramount. Relevant analytics help brands make data-driven decisions.
For instance, if you notice that most of the negative reviews on your app's store page highlight similar issues, you can fix them to reduce friction. Maybe the update has a bug that you missed. The reviews will point you to it.
Customer experience analytics also allow you to identify bottlenecks in your customers' journey. For example, you might be losing customers at the checkout process. It's likely the checkout process is too long or has too many steps. You may find customers abandoning their carts due to high shipping fees. Whatever the issue may be, you can use analytics to pinpoint it and make necessary changes.
The most notable role of analytics in customer experience is in consumer retention. It's quite simple: the happier your customers are, the more likely it is that they will stick with your brand.
If you track your customer service analytics regularly, you'll be quick to catch up on issues that may cause customers to leave. You can then fix them in a timely manner instead of letting them frustrate your customers to a point where they have no option but to switch to a different company.
It's not always possible to measure customer experience analytics manually. You may give it a shot, but it's time-consuming and impractical, especially if you have a vast customer base. Instead, the following tools will help.
Here at JustReply, we claim to be made for "teams where everyone should do support." and we have the features to live up to the claim.
If you are already using Slack for your team's communication, JustReply should definitely be your pick for a customer support tool. It integrates seamlessly with Slack, letting you resolve customer queries with minimal hassle.
Some other features of JustReply include:
Qualaroo is a customer and user feedback software that you can use to get real-time insights into customer behavior. With this tool, you can reach the right customers with the right questions at the right time. Moreover, Qualaroo has an AI-powered analytics engine that helps identify patterns in customer feedback.
Qualaroo's Nudge™ is the platform's non-intrusive feedback widget that helps you engage with customers without coming across as pushy.
UserPilot is a product growth platform but also has analytics features like:
MixPanel is a product analysis tool that lets you see different aspects of customer experience to see which ones need to be tweaked. You can use the Mixpanel SDK to stream data from your app and start analyzing it.
Support teams can analyze the change in customer experience metrics by breaking them down by:
The built-in friction-identification tool helps you identify bottlenecks in your product experience. Plus, you can identify hidden patterns to find the root cause of any problem.
Zendesk is a complete customer experience solution, but we'll only focus on the analytics part. The platform features Zendesk Explore, which lets teams uncover consumer insights. You can use it to monitor historical and real-time data to understand the relationship between current and past trends.
Zendesk also has pre-built dashboards for different channels that you can employ to analyze sales and service performance. Assign colors to different customer service metrics and track them individually in the same platform.
Qualtrics Connect is a comprehensive customer experience analytics tool that lets you gauge customer intent, effort, and emotion. Even better, you can "hear" what customers are saying about you on different platforms like Facebook, Glassdoor, Twitter, Tripadvisor, Google, etc. Whatever you find can be used to improve user experience.
Merely choosing a customer experience analytics tool doesn't suffice. You need to follow the right practices for its use, too. Here are some tried and tested ones.
Start by deciding which customer experience metrics you want to track. Here are some good ones:
You calculate the NPS by taking the percentage of people who would recommend your product/service and subtracting the percentage of those who wouldn't.
Set a scale from 1 to 10 and ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand. The Promoters are customers who give you a 9 or 10, while the Passives will give you a 7 to 8. They're happy with your product but won't actively advocate for you.
Anyone who gives 0 to 6 is a detractor. Subtract the percentage of detractors from the promoters, and you'll get your NPS.
The customer effort score is the amount of effort a customer has to put in to get their issue resolved. Customer service departments ideally aim for low CES scores. Again, you can create a 5-point or 10-point scale to gauge CES.
When going into customer experience analytics, don't limit yourself to just numbers. Include qualitative data, too.
We mean you must be reading reviews, comments, and feedback from customers on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Business, and Yelp.
You can even use sentiment analysis tools to extract the overall sentiment of your customers towards your brand online.
Don't make customer experience analysis a once-a-year activity. Track your customer experience metrics regularly, be it every month or quarter.
It's good to have benchmarks to compare your findings to. If your NPS or CES score constantly declines, it's a warning call for immediate action. Don't forget to analyze data from different touchpoints. The more you know, the better.
Once you have the customer experience data in hand, it's time to take action. Review the data and ask yourself:
You can have all the insights you need, but if you're not taking proactive measures to improve consumer experience using them, it's all for nothing. One way to do this is through the use of a reliable customer service tool like JustReply.
Its minimalist inbox, Slack integration, speedy macros, and collaborative workspace make it a must-have for early-stage startups. Get started to redefine customer support.
