Making customer experience a top priority is only the beginning. To make good on your intentions and ensure you’re consistently meeting expectations, you’ll also need a customer experience monitoring process.
Monitoring CX is an ongoing objective, especially in the current landscape. Digital technologies are evolving at the speed of light (well, almost), which means your customers’ expectations are always changing. What worked well for your CX strategy today might not work as well six months or a year from now.
Let’s explore the role of CX monitoring, its benefits, and how to go about implementing tools and technologies to support it.
Table of Contents:
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What Is Customer Experience Monitoring?
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Why CX Monitoring Matters
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6 Important Benefits of CX Monitoring for Your Business
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How to Perform CX Monitoring
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How to Implement CX Monitoring in Your Strategy
What Is Customer Experience Monitoring?
We define customer experience monitoring as the intentional act of monitoring the customer experience. This process uses a combination of tools and automation to constantly monitor experiences from multiple sources and perspectives.
You might also see customer experience monitoring referred to as digital experience monitoring (DEM) or end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) or simply experience monitoring.
No matter how you say it, the goal remains the same: to gain data-driven insights on how your customers feel about their experiences and adjust accordingly.
Why CX Monitoring Matters
Being proactive about customer experience monitoring is critical for any customer-centric business. From the website to the contact center, tracking the digital experience helps you remain competitive.
CX monitoring can give your business valuable insights into the user experience, including:
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Immediate notification when an issue arises
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Greater context into an issue
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Effectiveness of your customer service
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A holistic view of your customers
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A greater understanding of customer satisfaction
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How to improve and optimize the customer journey
You can use these and other findings to make meaningful improvements to the customer experience. In return, customer satisfaction increases, allowing you to grow your sales and loyalty.
6 Important Benefits of CX Monitoring for Your Business
CX monitoring across all of your digital channels offers a range of benefits that can translate into tangible business value. These include:
1. Get Real-Time Alerts for Continuous Improvement
Using CX monitoring technologies like machine learning and automation gives you real-time, ongoing updates. For example, Linkfluence gives you instant insights at a glance via a single dashboard. You can see where you stand at all times based on the metrics and analytics that matter to you.
2. Combine User Data from Multiple Sources
The user experience is increasingly decentralized. The number of channels a person uses to make purchases, discover products, learn information, or handle tasks has proliferated in recent years.
What’s more, more people are working from home and accessing systems and websites from more locations and devices. They can have experiences from just about anywhere, whether it’s a hotel room, home office, local coffee shop, or in co-working spaces.
Digital experience monitoring brings all of these experiences together to create a holistic view of CX. This helps to create seamless experiences across the board, regardless of device, location, or channel. Using one platform to collect experience data contributes to end-to-end CX monitoring, allowing you to gain a single view for easier management.
3. Improve Your Net Promoter Score
The customer experience plays an important role in whether your customers refer you to others. Studies show that 64% of customers are more likely to recommend a brand if it offers a simple experience, while 71% of respondents say they recommend products or services if they had a great experience.
Monitoring CX is one way to create experiences that delight your customers. You can measure this impact via your Net Promoter Score, or NPS. This score uses a simple survey to find out how likely a customer is to recommend you to others. The higher the NPS, the more likely you are to gain referrals.
4. Cater to Non-Human Users
When thinking about the customer experience, it’s common not to consider how machines interact with each other. But with automation and the Internet of Things playing an increasing role in daily life, it’s important to account for non-human interactions. The truth is that these machines interact on behalf of humans — if they can’t deliver the right information, the customer experience suffers.
DEM can help account for non-human interactions. It helps to reveal potential bottlenecks in processes that might hinder users from achieving the desired outcomes.
5. Make the Right Training Investments
Customers interact with your brand in various ways, through in-store visits, speaking to an agent in a contact center, visiting your website, or engaging on social media, for example.
In some cases, your customers may directly interact with employees. They expect employees to be able to answer their questions and resolve issues. But in order to do that, employees must have the right knowledge and be empowered to handle customer requests.
CX monitoring can give you deeper insights into how customer interactions transpire. If issues aren’t being resolved or customers are churning, you can make data-driven investments in training your staff accordingly. Discover the customer issues they encounter on a daily basis so they can be better prepared to help customers when needed.
6. Address Tech-Related Performance Issues
Self-guided interactions can also impact a customer’s perception of your brand. If they encounter tech-related issues, such as slow page-loading time or software glitches, their satisfaction may plummet.
Using CX monitoring tools can provide more visibility into user-led experiences. Use it to detect trends in user experiences to identify what features might need more testing and development.
How to Perform CX Monitoring
CX issues can be hard to detect. The customer experience is comprised of hundreds (if not thousands) of possible metrics, making it difficult to know what to track and which metrics will add the most value. Connecting metrics to their impact on business value isn’t straightforward, either.
CX monitoring isn’t a magical elixir, but it does help to close some serious gaps in user monitoring, issue detection, and real-time analytics. To use digital experience monitoring tools effectively, we suggest a layered approach that starts with the customer and works toward supportive technology.
Let’s explore some best practices.
Begin with Customer-Facing Channels
The layers that are closest to your customers should be given top priority: websites, mobile apps, and customer service channels (e.g., call centers or chatbots).
In each of these channels, you’ll want to make sure that content and services are available, accessible, functional, and easy to use. What’s more, you also want to ensure that any data the customer shares is secure.
Use these questions and areas of opportunity to inform this process:
Website
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Does your website frequently experience downtime or overload?
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Are all links on your website working?
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Are there any JavaScript error codes that should be fixed?
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Do pages load at an optimal speed?
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Can customers easily navigate your website?
Mobile App
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Are customers using your mobile app?
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Does your app crash frequently?
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Do all links within the app work?
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Can customers easily navigate your app?
Customer Service
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Do customers have their questions answered or issues resolved on the first attempt?
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How long do customers wait to speak with an agent?
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What’s the churn rate of customers who contact customer service?
These aren’t the end-all questions to ask, but they do provide a solid starting point for improving your CX monitoring processes.
Don’t Forget Backend Services
Your customer-facing channels are usually supported by third-party APIs and “microservices.” When these services underperform, so does your own CX.
Take stock of your backend services that contribute to the customer experience. Then examine each one in greater detail to sniff out bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Validate that these services are reliable and are meeting your customers’ needs. Keep a log of backend errors (e.g. crashes, data breaches, downtime, poor user experience) so you can make data-driven decisions on whether to keep or replace those services.
Improve Underlying Infrastructure
Your customers don’t think about your on-premise or cloud-based infrastructure, but it’s the very thing that powers their experience. You’ll want to examine your full-stack technologies to see how they work and whether they’re meeting the demands and needs of your customers.
For example:
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Do you have unresponsive systems or features?
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How can users access your products or services?
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What personal data can your users access and control?
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Are there any security vulnerabilities that need to be addressed?
The specifics of improving your infrastructure will be unique to your organization. Your customers might not spell out their grievances with your technology, but you can use surface-level experiences (such as those on your website’s front end) and work backward to improve your core technologies.
How to Implement CX Monitoring in Your Strategy
Data alone isn’t enough to drive change. Once you discover potential issues, you also need a process for using that data to implement solutions.
In general, DEM tools can give you the “what” of CX monitoring. With Linkfluence's all-in-one platform, you can also learn more about the “why” behind the issues. Our combination of AI-driven insights and intelligence from human data scientists gives you more context in CX-related opportunities. As a result, you gain knowledge and the next-best actions to make valuable improvements your customers will appreciate.
Learn more when you request a demo!