New and Emerging CX Indicators and How They Work

Over the past few years, CX has continued to improve the ability to understand the customer experience. Advances in technology now give you the ability to measure and quantify Customer Effort, Emotion, and Intent from your customer feedback sources (solicited or unsolicited). These newer metrics can provide a deeper understanding of your customers’ entire journey.

Many companies are starting to use Customer Effort Score (CES) as their CX Key Performance Indicator (KPI) instead of Net Promoter Score (NPS)*. A Customer Effort Score tells you how easy or difficult it is to do business with you from the customer’s point of view. CES can either be derived by advanced analytics or simply solicited, much like NPS.

Customer Emotion helps to group your customers’ feedback into more than just positive, negative, or neutral. Emotions like Confusion, Frustration, or Elation can add additional context (how do your customers feel) to your standard CX KPIs, giving you better insights on what actions to take that will have the best emotional outcome for your customers.

Sophisticated technology now enables us to know the customer’s actual Intent. For example, are they contacting you to complete a task, or do they need more information? Intent can help you determine if there is an operational change that needs to be made, or maybe something as simple as updating your outward communication or FAQs.

Companies that have started measuring their Customer Effort, Emotion, and Intent through advanced analytics as part of their VoC program are seeing measurable improvement of their CX metrics with a direct impact on the company’s bottom line.

Improving Customer Effort can drive up loyalty and decrease operational costs. Gartner noted in a recent study that 96% of customers with high effort interactions become disloyal. Customer Effort is now regarded as a leading indicator of customer loyalty while NPS is a lagging indicator. Understanding what causes hard customer effort can help keep customers loyal before they churn. In another study, Gartner found that “low-effort experiences reduce costs by decreasing up to 40% of repeat calls, 50% of escalations, and 54% of channel switching.” “Overall, a low-effort interaction costs 37% less than a high-effort interaction.”

With the COVID-19 pandemic shifting customer expectations, the link between the intensity of Customer Emotion and CX delivery is growing stronger, customers want to know that companies care about how they feel. As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. While major think tanks and CX firms (Forrester, Gartner, etc.) are still researching the underlying impact on revenue, we are seeing CX Leaders in Financial Services and Insurance industries take the lead on utilizing Empathy and Emotion to prioritize and improve customer experience.

At Farlinium, we have developed business templates using industry-leading CX technologies that we can activate for our customers to both quantify and measure their customers’ Effort, Emotion, and Intent to be able to prioritize business improvements that drive positive customer experience and ultimately lead to beneficial business outcomes. If you are interested in guiding your business decisions with the latest and greatest in customer experience analytics, please reach out here and we’ll be happy to assess your CX program and let you know how we can help.

* Net Promoter and NPS are registered service marks, and Net Promoter Score is a service mark, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.