In a world transitioning towards mobile-first for ecommerce, understanding how to improve your customer experience is increasingly important, necessary to adapt to changing needs and improve what is offered. Here, customer experience is often confused with customer satisfaction and the concept of “delighting customers” so before talking about the best survey questions to use for measurement of customer experience, an understanding of what customer experience (CX) actually is, – is necessary.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer Experience or CX is NOT just customer satisfaction. If you measure customer satisfaction you will find out if your customers are happy or not with what you offer/supply, but it does not provide any tangible benefit to you, it doesn’t help you improve what you offer or supply.
Measuring customer satisfaction is on par with measuring customer sentiment via Net Promoter score, again while nice, and it provides an early warning system akin to a canary in the coal mine, but otherwise it’s of limited use.
You need to understand WHY they feel the way they feel.
Customer experience is NOT about trying to delight customers because once again, delighting customers is pointless if your goal is to increase customer loyalty.
Therefore, CX is the sum product of the customers interaction with your brand. Regular monitoring of customer experience metrics can provide valuable insights into how customers perceive and engage with your brand.
This would include:-
- Navigating your website – every aspect, home page, landing page, sales page, FAQ pricing page etc.
- Payment Processing
- Automated messaging
- Customer Service (SLA), responsiveness/helpfulness of support both in person or automated or via bot.
- Mechanisms for feedback
Effectively, CX is the customers experience of every touch point with your business during the customer journey.
Here it’s important to point out that perception or your brand IS reality. Therefore, if you have a problem here then it is likely to be with the communication/PR/Marketing of what you offer.
Building a great customer experience is the best way to build loyalty.
How to Quantify Customer Experience.
Customer experience is best measured by combining 3 metrics, two of which have already been mentioned above.
1) Customer Sentiment – via the Net Promoter Score (NPS)
“The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one way to measure user sentiment and is a very broad and general survey, canvassing all your website visitors. It therefore only provides an indicator of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, providing no details of why they are satisfied or dissatisfied.”
2) Customer Satisfaction – via the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
The customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a real-time, – in the moment post purchase a popup survey asking the question “How satisfied were you with your experience?” to test the immediate satisfaction of the customer in reference to a single transaction. A scale of 1-5 is perfectly sufficient.
3) Customer Effort Score – Lifetime value indicator.
A single question in reference to a purchase, asking the question “How easy was it to complete your purchase on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest representing a high chance of repeat business.
The X Factor – What are the best survey questions to ask?
Besides the the survey questions above, to be useful, you need to know whether what you offer solves the customer’s needs, but this is most likely not a simple yes or no answer, the question must be split into several parts:-
1. Does what you offer solve their pain points?
2. Does what you offer/provide meet the initial expectations (you need to find out what their perceptions/expectations were via feedback/survey).
3. If the answer to question 2. Is just no, then you need to understand why not, here use an open question to elicit a written explanation.
The answer to question 3 will provide some great insights about what you could do differently to improve your product or service.
However, you might find what you offer exceeds their expectations, if this happens it provides valuable information about faults within your marketing and PR content and strategy. Why didn’t the customer know how great your product was?
Your questions can be personalized to the product, or product category and ultimately provide feedback to your marketing, product and customer support teams. Additional questions could be found in the customer feedback forms from Betterflows.
Conclusion
By measuring customer experience, you can obtain quantifiable data that can be used to improve what you offer which is after all, at the very heart of conversion rate optimization.
Through the use of OptiMonk’s custom popup, you can add the feedback 5-star element and craft a question as suggested above.
A multi-step popup provides the opportunity to string a series of questions elicit feedback on all areas of customer experience mentioned above. In addition, a 4th question with a text area available for longer responses enables your customer to explain why they provided the score they did.
In combination, a single multi-step popup survey can provide all the customer experience data you need enabling you to improve what you offer on a product by product basis.
An alternative to measuring customer experience is to measure loyalty. Customer loyalty is highly dependent upon customer experience. Therefore, it might also be worth adding some customer loyalty multiple-choice questions (see the prior link and the questions provided) to your multi-page popup feedback form.
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