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Historically, IT teams operated separately from business users and established their own set of deliverables and KPIs. That’s mostly because legacy service management tools aren’t built to measure other indicators like customer sentiment or experience satisfaction – but instead typically focus on service level agreement (SLA) deliverables or workflow optimizations.
However, with the shifts in digital behavior over the past year and a half, that siloed approach will no longer serve internal teams – and more importantly, the end-customer – effectively in the long-term. Since the pandemic only amplified IT’s role in delivering business and customer outcomes, it’s now time for IT to set KPIs that reflect this new focus and integrate the next phase of the SLA: Experience Level Agreements (XLAs). This is one of the key foundational elements that can enable a massive business transition and change how “experience” is measured and tracked across an organization.
By working closely with other business units to identify and assign new KPIs that directly correlate with customer experience (CX) goals and translate to XLAs, organizations can drive an increase in customer retention, satisfaction, and conversion.
Here are three important customer experience KPIs that should be incorporated into IT’s business objectives and measured for performance:
User Experience
A new-found emphasis on digital channels continues to rapidly increase across all industries – and this pandemic-influenced trend is not going away anytime soon.
A key component to a successful online journey that drives conversion and reduces churn includes an intuitive user experience that is seamless and supported across channels. In fact, it’s a common misconception that IT might think this traditionally CX-heavy component falls outside its territory.
Customer engagement and retention is directly correlated to a positive user experience, and this experience can and should be supported by a dedicated IT team that can support employees in real-time. From an XLA perspective, user experience can have a direct effect on crowd-sourced reviews or their digital app rating. By communicating usability testing best practices, closely monitoring customer feedback, and tracking data, IT will have a better understanding of what aspects of the online journey fail, which components are successful, and how to more effectively advocate for customers.
Customer Satisfaction
Response and resolution times (i.e., if something breaks, how quickly will it be fixed) have always fallen within the scope of IT’s responsibilities. While this is still an important facet of IT, the need has evolved beyond tickets and one-time customer interactions.
IT should now be measured more directly in ways that are business-focused and infused within the customer relationship. XLAs for customer satisfaction can include social network sentiment scores, social engagement, and survey scores.
While there are specific measurements that can calculate customer satisfaction (CSAT), the metric has evolved beyond a questionnaire and can now be monitored by recurring business and increased account size.
Field service, for example, is a concept that has long been a key strategy for sales teams. However, during the pandemic, field operations were largely put on hold. To address this gap, digitally savvy organizations developed new tools and AI-powered technology that enabled a fully remote service operation designed to meet client needs and grow the relationship – as service is often referred to as the new face of the business.
To support this new functionality, serve customers, and reach satisfaction goals, IT teams need to be fully aligned with business deliverables, so they are better equipped to drive this experience and the longevity of the relationship.
Conversion Rate
A long-standing KPI in the world of ecommerce is the conversion rate. Mathematically speaking, the rate is calculated by dividing the number of desired brand interactions by total site visitors within a specific amount of time. While marketing or business teams typically own this metric and continually strive to increase it, there are a variety of ways that the responsibility of this datapoint can also fall to IT.
For example, if a brand has a confusing check-out experience or poor navigation functionality, conversion rates are likely to fall, simply because consumers are struggling to – or don’t want to spend the time figuring out how to – complete their purchase. Maybe there’s a slow page load time or consumers face frequent error pages.
This is where IT, marketing, and the business users can work together to propose new ideas and fixes that can help customers complete their purchase and ideally, return to place additional orders in the future. For XLAs, conversion rate can be impacted and measured by the number of site visitors, the number of app downloads, or the total time spent engaging with a brand’s digital channel.
A symbiotic relationship
This past year has consistently proven that there’s no longer a separation between IT and the business – the two functions must work together for an organization to thrive in today’s evolved experience economy. As new projects roll out, IT will drive more of the priority business outcomes and be expected to think more like the business. CX is a massive piece of that equation, because the business is always thinking about the customer.
Organizations consistently struggle to provide “Experience as a Service” (XaaS) to their customers. At the root of the issue is typically a poor alignment with XLAs. To address this gap, both business and IT leaders need to recognize the interdependence and opportunity for synergy between siloed technology systems and pivot to an operating model that aligns IT capabilities to deliver against specific XLAs and KPIs.
By prioritizing customer experience goals for IT, including user experience, customer satisfaction, and conversion rates, an organization will have a more holistic, end-to-end perspective across its marketing, sales, service, and marketing initiatives.
About the Authors:
Sameer Bhagwat, VP and Head of Application Managed Services, and Jonathan Brassington, EVP and Digital Customer Experience Practice Lead, at Capgemini Americas