The Metric Stew for CX Health
What recipe might work for your company’s CX efforts to reduce churn and check your customers’ health and vital signs? Flourish experts share their secret ingredient for a data-focused customer health recipe.
Capturing meaningful data to diagnose poor customer health, and determine the best course of action to proactively prevent churn is vital to providing great customer experiences. But how do you measure their satisfaction and engagement? How do you know you have the right tools and analytics to measure your customers’ health?
In the December edition of the Flourish Executive Roundtable series, top CX leaders shared their company’s recipes for measuring customer health and their secret metric ingredients that drive meaningful outcomes.
The discussion was moderated by Rod Cherkas, Founder and CEO of HelloCCO. Rod brought with him rich experience as an executive at several of Silicon Valley’s most customer-centric companies, including three that achieved successful >$1 billion IPOs or exits (RingCentral, Marketo, Gainsight).
Here are the four most interesting insights about customers’ health our CX experts’ shared:
Too often, customer-facing directors only start analyzing patterns of customer behavior when problems arise. Our CX leaders agreed that it is always beneficial to start working on your customer experience by focusing on your goals and what you want to achieve with customers, rather than on what worked or not. Ask yourself, they advise, how your help is needed, when is it most effective and how you can scale it right to multiple customers, automated or not.
Cross functional collaboration is another important element of great customer health outcomes, advised our experts. Collaborate with relevant stakeholders in your company, whether it’s the business, marketing or product teams, and make sure to keep up with monthly updates and educate each team about priorities. For example, talk with the product team about their prioritization of specific product updates over others. Maybe consider making a pilot partnership with your partners to share ideas and input about how to solve churn.
Customer health metrics will be most effective when you maintain your customer-contact hygiene. Manage your distribution list based on your customers’ perspective. Target each customer audience with the messages they need for each product use case. Don’t blast them with extra information. This will increase your open rates and click through rates.
During virtual events, for example, make sure to ask your users pointed and direct questions, such as “what would you like to see on your roadmap?” Virtual customer events are an excellent way to gather information from an interested and engaged crowd. You’d be surprised how valuable their answers will be.
The secret ingredients for customer health metrics that our Flourish members shared include the vital signs, trends, and metrics you need to explore to diagnose your customers’ health to prevent churn.
Wear your apron, prepare your cooking space and let’s start cooking!
It can help fight churn, but it is not necessarily it’s only purpose. When using health scores mainly to prevent churn, you might find yourself over-servicing a lot of customers. When the customer health score is not modeled correctly, it may falsely indicate that certain customers are in jeopardy, leading CX teams to burn up a lot of resources unnecessarily, and spending extra time on customers that probably aren't really churn risks. In this way, when you are using customer health score to prevent churn it is almost too late. So, using a health score metrics that can also show you the necessary minimum customer facing interactions to maintain healthy relationships could be very beneficial.
Almost the opposite of churn, Time to First Value (TTFV) measures customers’ usage and purchase. Look at use cases by persona periodically and use cases across the segments of customers, and check the correlation between your TTFV and whether or not you retain or upsell customers. You can also use TTFV as a mid-journey checkpoint, to understand if and how the customers are responding to your input.
Asking your customers about the likelihood they will recommend your product is important. But even if your score is the highest, it still does not predict customers’ actual behavior. Simply put, has the customer actually recommended your product to anybody? Because if the behavior does not match with the result of the NPS survey, then how meaningful is the Net Promoter Score for your bottom line?
Mapping and modeling your customers' health score is vital, agreed all the CX leaders who participated in the Flourish December Executive Roundtable. Using the right model to measure your customers’ health scores is important not only to prevent churn, but also to understand how it relates to your relationship with your customers in general.
What’s your secret CX ingredient? Let us know!
Bon Appétit!
