These days, customers have the power to elevate or destroy a business with negative reviews or unfavorable online interactions. Word of mouth marketing through digital channels can be a valuable tool for a business, making it all the more important that customers have something good to say.
Companies that understand this, know that the value of customer experience (CX) monitoring in today's business world cannot be overstated. In fact, prioritizing customer experience monitoring is no longer an option, but a strategic imperative.
For businesses to thrive, it's critical that they're well equipped with the capacity to measure and quantify the return on investment (ROI) of their customer experience initiatives.
Experience monitoring solutions are imperative, not only to monitor customer experience and improve customer satisfaction, but to identify trends that can promote business growth.
Without these tools, organizations have no way of collecting data that provides real time, actionable insights into customer behavior or customer expectations.
In this article, we'll explain why customer experience monitoring is becoming a high priority for businesses to retain satisfied customers, attract new ones, and gain a competitive advantage.
What is customer experience and why does it matter?
There is a direct link between customer experience and revenue growth, and understanding this link is vital for businesses.
There are five key elements of customer experience, and each one is as important as the other in digital marketing. Tracking these elements, or digital experience monitoring with the right monitoring solutions is mission critical:
-
Customer acquisition - the process of bringing in new clients or customers
-
Customer journey - the path of interaction that a customer has with your brand, product or services
-
Customer interactions - the communications and engagements that occur between company and client
-
Customer satisfaction - the measure of how happy/unhappy customers are with a company's products, services or capabilities.
-
Customer loyalty - The strength of the connection between a customer and your brand, products and/or services.
Find out more about enhancing your customer experience with digital experience marketing
The value of customer experience monitoring
In today's digital landscape, it's essential to have a comprehensive understanding of your customer experience. Positive customer experiences directly relate to revenue growth, and positive customer interactions are far more likely to result in repeat buyers, loyal brand advocates, and a lower churn rate.
According to Forbes:
The customer-centric aspect
CX monitoring is partly about collecting performance data, but it's what you do with the data that counts. Customer experience monitoring helps organizations gain actionable insights into customer journeys. It identifies those who had exceptional customer experiences, and those who encountered issues during their interactions.
CX monitoring involves tracking, analyzing, and interpreting these customer interactions across various digital touchpoints, such as digital and voice channels, human interaction and online interactions. It can vastly improve service quality, and elevate a brand's reputation significantly.
For example customer experience monitoring solutions like IR Collaborate provide real-time analytics dashboards that provide visibility into the customer experience, allowing actionable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points.
Image source: Survey Sparrow
Data-driven decision-making
If you don't have the customer data and tools to gauge customer satisfaction, you can't make informed business decisions such as carrying out product and service improvements or enhancements.
Analyzing customer feedback helps businesses maintain brand loyalty, and identify pain points or areas where customers repeatedly encounter difficulties. By addressing these issues, businesses can increase customer retention, and enhance their products or services to better meet the needs of their customers.
Personalizing customer interactions and experiences
Through properly analyzing behavioral data, you can gain insights into your customers' preferences and interests, allowing you to personalize communications with them through targeted messaging, promotions, and recommendations.
Enhancing customer support and engagement
Real time insights help identify recurring customer issues and concerns, allowing businesses to positively address these problems and improve customer support processes. For example, optimizing self-service options can help to reduce customer frustration and response times.
Reduced Churn
Your company's profitability largely depends on your ability to retain existing customers. Some customer churn is inevitable, but a high churn rate can affect your bottom line, so CX monitoring is crucial to track this. According to research by Harvard Business School, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase an organization's profits by 25% to 95%.
Find out more about enhancing your customer experience with digital experience marketing
What is synthetic monitoring?
Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) is a proactive element of end user experience monitoring, that measures and tests the functionality, performance, and user interaction with a website or service, using simulated transactions to replicate and mimic user behavior.
Unlike real user monitoring, STM can actively monitor what it’s like to log into your site, load time, interaction with various elements on web applications, adding to the shopping cart, etc.
This monitors the journey that real customers take, and is crucial to uncovering transaction aspects that aren’t working as intended, before they impact actual users and your organization’s bottom line.
What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
APM is another cog in the wheel of customer experience monitoring. APM tools are a vital part of the ongoing process, as they manage your systems, gather performance metrics, identify performance issues with your applications, and ensure that they're functioning the way they're supposed to. These tools help to make sure that your customers' digital experiences remain positive.
Find out more about APM
Data collection and analysis
Any business undergoing digital transformation must have a comprehensive view of customer interactions, behaviors, and levels of satisfaction. The data to perform these analytics is obtained through different channels and touchpoints like websites, mobile applications, social media channels, feedback through surveys etc. and in-store visits.
Key metrics include:
-
Net Promoter Score (NPS) - A customer's willingness to recommend a company's products or services to others.
-
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) - The degree to which a product or service has met or exceeded your customer's expectations.
-
Customer Effort Score (CES) - The ease with which customers can get their issues resolved and/or their needs met.
To improve the overall CX experience, these data types, and others, are important as a whole for analyzing and improving the overall customer experience.
CX monitoring with IR
To ensure excellent customer experience, and to gain a competitive edge, it’s essential that all your marketing channels, contact center technology and web applications are working all the time.
IR's suite of performance management solutions provide real-time monitoring insights that can deliver a level of service to exceed customer expectations.
We provide insights that allow a deep dive into all your systems. Monitoring and real time assessment to support payment hubs, and keep unified communications ecosystems and contact centers running as they should.
With IR you can:
Deliver a great customer experience - every time - get detailed, real-time insight into voice, web, and video availability, performance, and quality of service to elevate customer satisfaction.
Test voice, web and video under real-world conditions - real-time testing, under real-world conditions can verify capacity, performance, stability, and resilience.
Deploy new technology with confidence - test outside-in, end-to-end performance before going live to ensure your customers’ experience will be exceptional.
Solve problems before they impact customers - find and fix issues quickly with automatic alerts pinpointing problems like system unavailable, long response times, packet loss, jitter, latency, picture quality, and more.
