The Metrics These Customer Success Teams Live by — and Why

by Alton Zenon III
January 24, 2020

Salesforce reports that 80 percent of consumers believe that a company’s customer experience is just as important as the goods or services it provides.

And there’s only one way customer success teams can determine they’re providing satisfactory customer experiences: Feedback. 

“Our entire organization works collaboratively to use customer feedback to optimize our products and services,” said Mora Walsh, head of customer experience, at card processing company SumUp. 

Using rubrics like Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT) and Customer Effort Scores (CES), feedback is translated into empirical data that determines the efficacy of business efforts. Walsh, as well as Popsockets’ Senior Customer Service Advocate Joseph Garcia, shared the role these metrics play in how their CS teams operate, below. 

 

PopSockets team in group photo
popsockets

PopSockets’ Senior Customer Service Advocate Joseph Garcia said the company holds itself accountable through a combination of its customer satisfaction and customer effort scores. The latter gives his team visibility into some of the difficulties customers experience when interacting with the company. 

 

Customer Effort Score

Monitoring the CES helps companies work to increase customer loyalty. Customers that have a difficult time doing business with a company are less likely to return in the future. The CES lets businesses quantify the level of difficulty their customers experience, helping them target pain-points in the customer experience journey and improve those areas.

 

What does customer success look like for your customers, and what metrics does your CS team use to measure success? 

Customer success to us looks like glowing remarks from our customers all over the world. This includes positive mentions on social media, our homepage and other websites regarding our products and their impact. 

However, there are times when what we have provided to our customers is not good enough. Sometimes the product doesn’t perform as intended, we don’t ship on time or we mess up as we try to help a customer. When this occurs, we welcome feedback and embrace the challenge to be better. We also look at our CSAT and strive to always be above the 95 percent customer satisfaction threshold. 

It is possible for the customer to be satisfied but have a very hard time getting there.”

 

What’s one metric you didn’t use to track but do now? 

In addition to CSAT, we recently started looking at our CES. This score shows how easy or hard it is for our customers to do business with us. If we were to look at CSAT only, we would miss this very important element. It is possible for the customer to be satisfied but have a very hard time getting there. CES ranges from 1-7 and our goal is to be at 6.5 on a consistent basis.

 

SumUp team in outdoor group photo
sumup

Mora Walsh said the metrics that guide SumUp’s customer success go beyond customer feedback. The head of customer experience said internal data on employee performance helps keep the team working at peak efficiency, which translates to more satisfied customers. 

 

Customer Satisfaction Score

The CSAT score is a direct measurement of customer satisfaction levels. This metric is usually determined by surveys, which are customizable and can be geared toward a specific portion of the customer experience. The score can be used to compare the satisfaction of service to other businesses and as a research tool that can drive the improvement of services.

 

What does customer success look like for your customers, and what metrics does your CS team use to measure success? 

We build payment solutions for small businesses across the country, so success for our customers — small business owners — is when their businesses run smoothly. Customer experience is the heart of SumUp, which is why our entire organization works collaboratively to use customer feedback to optimize our products and services. Our Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) from our surveys gives us a benchmark understanding of how we’re supporting our merchants. And qualitative responses are monitored daily to make sure every piece of feedback is addressed. 

A happy team means happy customers.”

 

What’s one metric you didn’t use to track but do now? 

As we start offering more diverse products and services, we know it’s important to constantly evaluate and optimize customer outreach. That’s why we work with a customer service automation platform to leverage search data from a 24/7 chatbot tool to enhance our customer experience content. At the same time, partners like TixTime provide us with performance data that allow us to optimize the scheduling and workflow of our internal customer experience team. A happy team means happy customers.

 

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