A Guide to Essential Consumer Data Metrics

The Gist

Customer success metrics are vital. Companies and brands cannot accurately gauge how satisfied their customers are without consumer feedback.
Don’t rely on one single metric. Different metrics reveal different things, which means it’s better to adopt and familiarize yourself with more than one to understand how consumers view your brand.
Consumer data strengthens customer success. A company or brand cannot retain their customers without understanding feedback data. It’s necessary to maintain a positive image and provide quality service.

Gathering information on customer experiences and how these evolve during the customer journey is lifeblood for a brand. With this data, businesses can prioritize the nurture and growth of their customer base.

The Value of Customer Success Metrics

It’s true that customers’ interactions with brands have substantially changed over recent years. Businesses can maximize customer data collection by appraising marketing objectives against real customer behavior and core targets. New research by McKinsey also shows companies using customer data to improve their customer service outperform similar businesses in sales growth by 85%.

Attentive listening and talking to customers can reveal important data about how they feel about company products and services. It also allows brands to increase the efficiency of their customer service and resolve issues more quickly.

As such, businesses need to flex in terms of mapping out the customer journey and measuring customer success to understand their customers better, help relationships thrive over time, and increase customer-brand engagement.

Elevate Customer Data Management

The answer may be found in one key area, in what The Economist referred to as “the world’s most valuable resource”: data.

But collecting this resource can be difficult. Customers don’t want to hand out their information to just anybody, which means companies must prioritize gathering, storing and using data sensitively and securely. Once their data is processed, a world of possibilities open up to better understand your customer, optimize their journey and help them thrive long-term.

And any future-facing company knows that if they don’t understand customer behavior, they won’t be able to leverage this precious asset of data — both for the benefit of customers and prolonged business growth.

So, let’s take a closer look at how consumer data can help your business measure customer success.

Tactics to Track Customer Success

Customer success managers know all too well that talking with customers and creating regular touchpoints throughout a customer’s journey are key to boosting brand awareness and customer success. That being said, below are some effective ways to improve customer data management and your use of customer success metrics for a better-quality customer experience.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

A great place to start is with monthly recurring revenue from your customers. You can work out how much customers spend with you each month by multiplying your total number of monthly customers by the average revenue per customer. This is a particularly strong tactic for monthly subscription companies as it helps monitor revenue more closely.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Using a Net Promoter Score is a really simple way to get instant and direct quantitative and qualitative customer feedback. Put simply, it’s a one-question survey, often sent over email or other digital channels, that asks your customer to rate how likely they would be to recommend your product or service to someone else. Many see it as a a solid metric that measures how loyal a consumer is to a brand.

Customer Churn Rate

Knowing how many customers you lose or churn is the bread and butter data. Brands can scrutinize their customer churn rate with the following formula:

Lost customers are divided by the total number of customers in a time period x 100.
So, if you lost 5 customers and had 500 customers, you divide 5 by 500 and x by 100.
This would be 5 / 500 = 0.01 x 100 = 1%.

The next move would be to organize a qualitative survey to discover why those customers churned. Brands can learn a great deal about their processes through churn analysis.

Qualitative Customer Feedback

Qualitative surveys dig deep to ask burning questions about the consumer experience — both from those who churn and those who are loyal. You can send your customers surveys in a variety of formats: through email, SMS or social channels. If you know where your customers hang out, you’re likely to get a prompt response because you’ve made the process smoother and easier for them.

Leverage Online Reviews

Brands that take part in online conversations with their customers can transform their customer satisfaction metrics. It’s clear from review websites like Reddit or Quora that brands are elevating full-spectrum customer communications.

Sharing a space with your customers is at the heart of great customer service and can provide dynamic customer data to help evolve your ways of working to better suit consumers. This type of direct interaction between company and customer is priceless — and public, so prospective consumers have evidence of your productivity and the swift, effective ways you respond to inquiries or issues. This will only build more trust, both with your existing customers and potential clients who might be researching your products and services.

Communication through online reviews can also be used as a complementary approach to derive valuable information about success with customers to positively evolve brand perception and loyalty.

Voice of Customer (VoC) program

All aspects of your business, from customer services to sales and marketing, can glean plenty of useful information about customer satisfaction when you create a voice of customer (VoC) program.

Consumers who have a positive experience with your company are more likely to return. VoC can amplify how your teams analyze, predict and understand how customers behave and feel about your product or service.

You can collate information for a VoC program from a variety of sources, including community forums, social media channels and feedback forms. This data supports all departments to connect, communicate and collaborate on what customers need across their whole journey.

Contact Resolution Rate (CRR)

Checking how quickly consumer inquiries are answered and dealt with will create more positive online chatter about your brand; customers talk and share opinions about in customer forums and social channels.

Research has shown that responding to customers within 24 hours after an inquiry or complaint can transform the way customers view your brand, leading to a more positive perspective that will be shared with other consumers.

Knowing, on average, how quickly your customer issues are answered — even if it’s with an acknowledgment message will help you manage customer relationships and improve customer service standards.

Final Thoughts: Harness Consumer Data to Strengthen Customer Success

Data must be used as a launchpad to create positive information management practices, improve customer service processes, harmonize teams and, ultimately, benefit consumers with a streamlined customer experience.

Without implementing data, companies and brands cannot wholly understand what kind of service they are providing, and as a result, will not make lasting impacts on their consumers.

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