Customer experience (CX) is not a ‘one-time setup and leave it’ operation. As long as your business exists, you need to continuously understand whether what you have in place is working and how you can improve.

But why do I need to measure my SME’s customer experience?

Why can’t I just make it and leave it if it’s working? Because what works for your customers today may not work for them tomorrow. In fact, great customer experience for one group may be distasteful to another; that is why you also need some personalisation.

In addition, measuring customer experience helps you understand the changing needs of your customers — what satisfies or dissatisfies them — and enables you to meet and exceed their expectations by improving the quality of your services.

So how do I measure customer experience?

1. Identify the touch points

You must understand your customer journey — how your customers get from knowing about your product to searching for information about it and eventually buying from you.

2. Know your customers

To have a better idea of how the customer journey looks like, you must know who your customers are. The better you understand your target audience, the more you can think like them and offer them the right products and services that they would appreciate.

3. Choose the right time

Many of your customers have little time to spend on things that are not important to them, including your measurement of how happy they are with your business. This means that you should make any survey as short and convenient as possible.

4. Decide on the right things to measure

There are several things you can measure. Deciding on the right one can determine whether your SME benefits from offering a great customer experience or not.

Well, what is the right thing to measure?

Different companies measure different things depending on what is important to the organisation. The most popular measurements (metrics) are:

1. Net promoter score (NPS)

Measures customer loyalty based on how likely customers are to recommend your business to their friends and buy goods or services from you in the future.

2. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT is used to check how satisfied customers are with your products or service with a question like ‘How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the goods/service you received?’

3. Customer effort score (CES)

This metric rates the ease of a particular experience and is used to measure how happy customers are about customer service rather than the overall brand experience.

4. Churn and retention rates

How many of your customers remain after a given period? Customer churn or retention is the number of customers that stopped using your products or service in a given period of time.

5. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

If a customer spends RM50 in your shop every week and you estimate they will continue to do so for the next two years (maybe they rent an apartment down the street from your supermarket), their CLV is RM5,200 for those two years.

6. Customer experience-related business KPIs

These can include other metrics that you can tie directly to business goals. For instance, the amount of time a customer spends in a queue waiting or how long it takes for your business to resolve customer issues.

Don’t measure just because you can.

You should measure to improve your business. These are not all the available metrics and you don’t have to use all of them. But it is helpful to use a combination of several to have a more complete view of your customer satisfaction.

Knowing exactly what you want to understand about how your customers use your products or services assists in deciding which one of the metrics will be more effective in helping you improve your customer experience delivery.

If you are looking for a digital system to improve your customer experience, check out the SurePay POS system that gives you and your customers more payment freedom with an easy-to-use interface.