To Data or Not to Data?
Data is a key aspect of any business, but especially for a customer experience (CX) department. As the British physicist and mathematician William Thomson Kelvin once said, “What is not defined, cannot be measured. What is not measured, cannot be improved. What is not improved, is always degraded.”
I fully agree with this statement. If you think your team is providing amazing support but aren’t regularly checking in with clients or gathering feedback through surveys, you’re really just guessing. It’s entirely possible that your customers are frustrated with long wait times or outdated technology but haven’t voiced these concerns directly. Data will tell you what customers might not.
Why Do You Need Data?
Data is critical to getting a holistic picture of your business and departments. It provides customer insight that you might not get otherwise. Done right, data can help reduce customer churn, increase revenue, improve loyalty, and enhance internal processes. It will also greatly increase the customer experience.
For example, a low CES (Customer Effort Score) indicates that your customers are not satisfied with how easy it is to contact or deal with your support team. This should prompt you to investigate and refine your contact procedures.
Another example is a high escalation rate. This might suggest that your frontline support team lacks the training or confidence to resolve issues on their own, leading to more escalations than necessary. This would likely correlate with a lower First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate, which could signal inefficiency depending on your business model.
What Metrics Are Important in CX?
There are numerous metrics in CX, each with its own purpose. Keep in mind that these metrics focus on customer support, while Customer Success departments might track different metrics like Net Revenue Retention (NRR), Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), and Customer Health Scores. Below are key customer support metrics:
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): How satisfied are you with your recent interaction?
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
- Customer Effort Score (CES): How easy was it to contact and deal with us today?
- First Response Time (FRT): How quickly your team responds to initial customer inquiries.
- Ticket Inflow Volume: The number of new tickets received over specific periods. Are there any patterns or spikes?
- Average Resolution Time (ART): The average time it takes to resolve an issue from the first contact to final resolution.
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): The percentage of tickets resolved during the very first interaction—indicating your team’s efficiency.
- Ticket Backlog: The number of unresolved or unresponded tickets.
- Escalation Rate: The percentage of tickets escalated to higher support levels—suggesting complexity or inefficiency.
- Resolution Rate: The percentage of tickets resolved out of the total received.
- Customer Retention Rate: The percentage of customers who continue using your service over a specific period.
- Cost per Ticket: The average cost of resolving a support ticket, reflecting your team’s cost efficiency.
Do You Have to Measure All of These?
No, you don’t need to track all of these metrics. The ones you focus on should align with your company’s needs and business model. For instance, here at Fishtank Consulting, we provide estimates for most of our work. This means that we rarely resolve issues on the first touch, so we don’t track First Contact Resolution (FCR).
Additionally, because some estimates are small while others are large, Average Resolution Time isn’t always a meaningful metric for us. Some tasks may take an hour while others take months, yet both timelines could be appropriate. However, we track our Estimates vs. Actuals to measure how accurately we meet our project timelines, and we’ve found this to be highly effective.
Unlock the Power of Data for Better Customer Experience
Data is essential. If you already have it—great! Now analyze it. Look for trends and turn those insights into actionable steps. If you don’t have data yet, start by gathering it with tools like CSAT, NPS, and CES surveys. Depending on your business model, you may not need every metric listed above or may need hybrid KPIs that better reflect your specific situation.
So, if the question is to data or not to data, the answer is always to data.
