In this modern era of data analytics, most businesses have enough information, metrics, data, and dashboards in their easy to use CRM software platforms to deal with. However, unfortunately, when it comes to Customer Experience or CX, most organizations do not always keep a track or measure and report the right metrics for their organization.
By 2020, more than 40 percent of all data analytics projects will relate to an aspect of customer experience- Gartner Click To TweetIn a report published in 2018 by NPX & CX Benchmark states:
“One-third of businesses (especially small and medium organizations) do not measure their Retention or Customer Churn.”
Well, this is indeed an irony since businesses spend a considerable amount of their time and resources in sales and marketing but ultimately they do not keep a track of how many of those acquired customers have been retained or try to find what were the reasons for their attrition.
Hence, how big or small your business is, and in which sector your company belongs to, here are key 4 top of the line Customer Experience metrics that you should track and measure at all times using your best small business CRM software.
Top of the line metrics in CX are those that bear minimum stats you should measure which are outcome indicators and lag measures that can be easily found in your easy to use CRM platform’s dashboard. These metrics help to keep us tied to our organization’s long term visions and goals for strategic business growth . Therefore, to show an improvement on these metrics, we need to improve other independent or lead Customer Experience (CX) metrics in your CRM database.
The most vital top line CX Metrics that you should always measure are:
So let us talk about each of them now briefly.
Possibly, there is no need for a detailed explanations since NPS has gained tremendous popularity in the recent times, as in a report published by Forrester it indicated that more than 70% of both big and small organizations listed in the Fortune 1000 companies use Net Promoter Score to measure the loyalty of their brands.
The biggest advantage of this metrics is its simplicity (you can use a single question format) to evaluate the customer’s intentions to recommend your offerings to their trusted ones, like friends, colleagues, and relatives.
The uniqueness of the NPS question lies in its 11 point survey, which is scaled from 0 to 10, with 0 to 6 as detractors, 7 and 8 as passive, and 9 and 10 as promoters of your brand.
In order to calculate your brand’s NPs, detract the percentage of Detractors from this percentage of Promoters.
For an example, if 60 percent of your respondents in the Net Promoter Survey (which you can perform using email campaigning functionality in your easy to use CRM) are Promoters and 10 percent are Detractors; your brand’s NPS is 50.
The importance of NPS is that it provides an insight into the customer loyalty spectrum for your business so that you can identify the weak points in your customer experience that needs improvement.
What is interesting and we are looking for in these two metrics is the ratio of CLV to CAC that can be easily measured in all best small business CRM software platforms.
CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) which is also known as LCV (Lifetime Customer Value) is the net economic or financial value associated to the relationship between the customer and the brand or the company.
CLV is an ideal metric that illustrates and lets us know how much revenue we are making from each customer. Additionally, when CLV is averaged out, any organization can easily generalize it for its entire customer base.
CLV is an important measurement that you must measure using your easy to use CRM software since if you are not making enough money from your relationship with your customers, it is no brainer that you may sooner or later seize to be in business.
Calculating net contribution (profit margin) or net financial value from an ongoing relationship with your customers will definitely involve the contributions that your buyers have made in the past and an ongoing estimate of their future contributions for your brand. Therefore, CLV or LVC is estimated metrics.
Hence, to explain it in its simplistic form, Customer Lifetime Value is the average sum of purchases made by your customers till they retire or churn.
Therefore, CLV takes into consideration the “average contribution from each customer per period” and the expected number of periods that the customer remains with the company.
For an example, if the average revenue of a CRM company like ConvergeHub is $59 per user/ month for its Premium Edition billed yearly, and if the cost of offering the service is $40, then its average customer contribution is $19 per month. Now, if the customer stays with the organization for 24 months before churning out, then the CLV for that customer is $456 ($19 x 24 Mt.)
This calculation takes into consideration, the Customer Retention Rate (or in a reverse way the Customer Churn Rate) and average contribution per customer.
We all know that the future value of cash flow is at all times less than its present value, therefore, this formula can be improved or adjusted also to include this aspect.
As Customer Lifetime Value engages an economic value to Customer Relationship strategy, CLV is considered as an excellent metric for the following:
Apart from this, evaluating each customer individually as against average CLV, to find out whose relationship is more precious for your brand can also help in customer segmentation for up-selling and cross-selling your other offerings.
CLV alone may aid you to a certain extent to refine your organization’s operations and service delivery models; however, we all know that Customer Experience (CX) begins right from Marketing.
Therefore, now you need a metric that considers an end-to-end impact, and that can only be measured by considering the Cost of Acquisition of Customer for your brand.
Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC) is the average cost of acquiring a customer which can include right from marketing and sales expenses to offers and discounts that your organization (if required) provides to its customers.
CLV/CAC
The ratio of CLV to CAC is extremely important and useful to evaluate the complete business model and its viability for any organization.
We say this because, when the CAC is greater than CLV, it clearly indicates that the business model is not a viable proposition at all.
Therefore, as a thumb rule, your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) must be 3 to 4 times more than your Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC).
There are several factors which drive this; however, CX professionals can play a significant role in optimizing this ratio using different levels of Customer Experience strategies to the purchasers of your offerings.
Apart from this tacking the trends of CLV and CLV/CAC ratio can also aid CX professionals to gauge the impact of CX initiatives that have been implemented in your organization.
Over the course of time, Customer Churn rate has become one of the other most popular metrics as most CX professionals talk about it while assessing ‘Customer Experience management’ of any organization.
Nevertheless, according to the NPX and CX benchmark report published in 2018, it states that:
Only one-third of companies proactively track their Customer Retention Rate (CRR) in their organization.
In simple language Customer Churn is the percentage or proportion of customers those who have discontinued or left after using a brand as against the total base of its active customers in the list.
In fact, the Customer Retention rate is just the inverse of Customer Churn rate, for which the math is:
1/Customer Churn Rate
Although apparently, it might look extremely easy, however, in reality, there are several scenarios such as non-recurring business models, pure subscription models, businesses with lock-in periods and without lock-in periods, and others that needs to be taken into consideration while measuring CCR. Therefore calculating CCR (Customer Churn Rate) for a brand is actually a very tricky process, which is one of the major reasons as to why businesses do not most often like to calculate their Customer Churn.
Nevertheless, we have found that base-lining an organization or brand’s historic churn rate is a far superior way to access the efficacy of that company’s Customer Experience initiatives as even lack of accurate data for benchmarking across industries is not a matter of concern to perform this calculation, which is a good metric to know the effectiveness of an organization’s Customer Experience strategy.
Revenue Churn Rate
Revenue Churn Rate is a variation of Customer Churn Rate since this metric portrays how much revenue got lost within a given period of time.
In other words, Revenue Churn Rate as the name suggests is a very pertinent economic and financial indicator of customer loyalty in ‘subscription-based business models’.
The math over here is, if $100 K is the recurring revenue of last month and if that has decreased to $90 K in the present month, there is a revenue churn of $10 K this month. Which means the Revenue Churn Rate is 10% [=100-90/100].
However, it must be most essentially remembered over here that you should take only into consideration the base of installed customers and should never add new acquisitions to the current month. Moreover, another simple version of the Revenue Churn Rate also ignores customers who have upgraded their subscriptions (a refinement that is not cover in this article).
Therefore RCR (Revenue Churn Rate) is as good as CCR (Customer Churn Rate) for all types of subscription-based business like Cloud Based CRM software solutions, except that downgrading a subscription would impact the RCR but not CCR.
This is a CX metric that is mostly neglected by several organizations across the globe. According to an NPX & CX Benchmark report published in 2018, only 15% of businesses use CES and hence it is one of the most under-utilized metrics by the CX Management fraternity.
However, it must be acknowledged that Customer Effort Score has a greater statistical correlation with both repurchase and enhanced spending rates than NPS.
That implies CES is a better metric to predictive repurchase and spending behaviors of your customers than Net Promoter Score.
For example, most of us would cherish to use a web-based check-in facility rather than stand in a check-in queue while boarding flights in an airport. This reduction in the customer’s effort by helping the customer to “get their job done” can radically increase brand preferences.
Much like NPS, Customer Effort Score (CES) is also measured through a single question but with a 5 point scale.
Another advantage for measuring CES is that the same question can be asked to the same customer times and again after every transaction as it obviously makes sense to find out if the customer has found it effortless to transact after each and every deal.
Conclusion
There are also many more metrics such as Turnaround Time, Service Levels, Compliance Percentage, and others that can also be tracked to measure CX of a brand, which we shall discuss later on.
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