Today, customers have more options for home services than ever before. With more choices at their fingertips, providing a positive customer experience is crucial. Customer experience is the impression you leave with your customers, shaping their perception of your brand from start to finish. A positive customer experience can be one of the most powerful tools for building brand loyalty, which can then build business through callbacks, referrals, and positive reviews online and on social media platforms.

The customer experience is more than just a customer service interaction. The customer experience encompasses all touch-points of the customer journey; your brand’s online presence, point of purchase, social content posted on your platforms, customer service interactions, and more.

Measuring the customer experience is important for growing your business, but where should you begin? We suggest analyzing data from surveys, reviews, and social listening, all of which are good starting points to evaluate your customer experience and boost your customer retention and potential for growth.

Surveys

Surveys are an efficient, popular way for your company to measure any aspect of the customer experience. A well-crafted survey can provide valuable insights into how customers perceive your brand and your product or services. Listening to survey feedback also better equips you to solve customer pain points and improve customer retention. You may send out a survey for customers to complete following a purchase or if a customer needs support through a phone number or website chat option. You can also use surveys to gauge interest in new products or launches. Regularly ask customers for feedback on their customer experience with your brand, from purchasing to support to customer service inquiries. When crafting a survey, keep these best practices in mind:

• Keep it short. The survey should take 5-10 minutes to complete
• Tailor the language, examples, and graphics to your target audience
• Use clear, direct language
• Use clean fonts and limit distracting images
• Consider an incentive to increase participation

Reviews

In a world where online reviews are king, 93% of customers read reviews before taking any action, it’s essential to include your customer and their feedback in the customer experience. Analyzing customer reviews, both good and bad, should be part of your customer experience strategy. There’s no question customer reviews can help attract new clients, improve sales, and sharpen your online brand image. But how can you utilize customer reviews to grow your business online? Let us show you.

Social Proof and Testmonials

Social proof is the idea that customers are more likely to buy something if they see others doing it, too. And testimonials are the perfect opportunity to display that customers are using and enjoying, your product or service. Simple, short recommendations from current happy customers are the perfect testimonial to display on your landing page or highlight on your social media platforms. Put those positive reviews and user testimonials to work in your social posts, on your website, and make sure you have positive reviews on your Google Business Profile.

Targeted Content

Customer reviews provide valuable intel into what your customers want to see from your content. Use that information as you’re planning content calendars to produce relevant blog posts, articles or social media posts addressing your customers’ needs and interests. If you have a common pain point with customers, build content around it and possible solutions.

Social Listening

Social listening is monitoring and analyzing social media content related to your brand or service to enhance the customer experience, and it provides valuable data for your company to boost its business. Real customers are actively talking about your brand online. It’s in your best interest to know what they’re saying. This real-time data-driven feedback is valuable intel, not just about your brand, but about your competitors as well. By utilizing social listening, you can easily see exactly what your customers and potential customers are saying about your brand and cater to their needs. Watch for pain points in their journey and work on strategies to reduce aspects of the customer journey that are consistently falling short.

How To Measure

Measuring these metrics is an important step in tracking how your customers perceive your brand and can provide valuable information on where your company can improve and boost your overall customer experience.

There are more than a few ways to quantify the customer experience but there are three popular methods. Most companies use Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES).

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the primary methods companies use to gauge customer experience. Your NPS is a quick way to measure the customers that love, are neutral or dislike your brand. An NPS asks customers, “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” The customer ranks their experience on a scale of 0-10. Scores 0-6 are detractors, 7-8 are passives, and scores 9-10 are promoters. Your NPS is the percentage of detractors minus promoter responses.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The CSAT is one of the most straightforward ways to measure your customer experience.

It’s a simple survey that asks customers to rate their experience after an interaction with your brand. For example, if your website has a chat feature and offers customer support via chat, you might ask your customer to rate their overall satisfaction following the resolution. Customers could then rank their interaction on a specified range.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Utilizing the Customer Effort Score (CES), the customer scores the amount of effort around a specific interaction. This number measures how hard it is for someone to achieve a goal with your brand. For example, how many clicks does a customer have to make between choosing a product and finalizing a purchase? How easy is point of checkout? Is your customer service easy to get in touch with? This number is important because it indicates, and can help erase, the friction between a potential customer and a conversion.

When analyzing metrics of your customer experience, the most important thing is to understand baseline and create an upward trend. The NPS, CSAT or any other customer experience score of other companies is less relevant than where your score currently is and how it’s improving. By utilizing surveys, reviews, and social listening, you can get a real-time pulse on your customer experience, and use that data to help inform important decisions from marketing and product strategy, to customer service and support improvements.

Customers have more choices about where to spend their money, and many are quick to ditch a brand after a bad customer experience, with 32% of consumers reporting they would stop doing business with a brand after just one negative experience. Customer experience matters more now than ever before, but we have the tools to help you succeed.

Want to learn more about how to monitor your reviews and engage with your audience more efficiently? Scorpion can keep track and engage with every customer review where it matters most. Let us help.