In their work, marketers use various tools to investigate the behavior of their customers and study their Customer Experience as best as possible, as well as track Customer Journey. This data helps to get a more holistic picture of the motivation, interest and purchasing decision patterns of potential and existing customers.
In today’s realities, it is important for a business to be not just customer-oriented, but customer-centric. And although many companies focus on customer satisfaction, this is not always the case.
In most cases, the company is primarily interested in numbers, goals, KPIs. For example, an increase in profits, an increase in the number of customers, an increase in sales and production turnover, etc. And this is logical, because the goal of any business is scaling, development and growth, which are impossible without making a profit. But today, in order to achieve success and become the best, you need to keep in focus what worries the customer, how to close this need, while doing it in the shortest possible time with maximum effect. That is, it is important for consumers that the business hears them and takes a step forward.
“It’s the customer who determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper.”
Peter Druckereconomist, one of the most influential management theorists of the 20th century.“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”
There is now a metric that few marketers track. This refers to CPI (Customer Performance Indicators), or, in other words, performance assessment from the customer’s standpoint.
CPIs have two main properties. First, this metric should be important for the customers. Secondly, a CPI should be measured in a value that customers understand: time, convenience, number of options, cost-effectiveness. Depending on the context, there are other indicators that customers consider important, and the marketer can bring them inside the company and track the results.
The CPIs show where a company is doing wrong and where it is missing out on growth opportunities. That is, they enable to see the problem, identify solutions and work on
fixing it.
Will CPIs fully replace KPIs?
It all doesn’t mean that CPIs will replace KPIs and you won’t need to track them. Both indicators are interrelated and potentially affect each other. That is, the higher the CPIs of your customers, the higher the KPIs of the company.
Let’s look into examples of what CPIs can be, how they affect KPIs and contribute to customer-centric business.
- Did the customer solve his or her problem during the first contact with you?
This CPI will affect your customer retention and overall KPIs throughout the entire company lifecycle. - Did anything got “broken” during the delivery of your products?
This CPI affects not only KPIs (such as customer retention and lifetime value), but also the company’s savings associated with customer service costs, issuing a deposit, and/or replacing defective products. - Is it easy to return your product?
If you have a low return rate, is it because the customer is happy with the product, or because the process of returning the product is difficult for the consumer? By further tracking and streamlining the procedure, you can better understand the reasons for returning your product. - How quickly did you complete your offer?
While your company sends a request to the appropriate employee and contacts the customer to provide a response, the customer collects offers from your competitors. By the time you contact the customer, he or she may have already made a purchase from another company, which provided information more quickly.
Besides, tracking CPIs will help marketers better understand and learn from the experience a customer gets while using a product.
Investing in Customer Experience can help you optimize costs, improve service metrics, and increase revenue, according to a Gartner research.
What solution to use to measure Customer Performance Indicators in a quality way?
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can measure and manage the CPIs you need to benefit your business.
There are a number of tools on the market that can help collect data from consumers in different ways, and you will independently combine the information received and manually enter the data into tables or documents. But such tools only work for partial data collection and give you a superficial understanding of customers and their satisfaction.
For a deeper understanding of consumer, try Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. With it, you can increase the level of Customer Experience in all departments of the company. By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, business users can create an event-driven customer journey by reaching customers at multiple touchpoints while converting leads through sales and support.
*Read about the capabilities of Microsoft Customer Performance Indicators here.
To learn more about Dynamics 365 Marketing and implement modern engagement tools in your business today, contact your manager or email us at: sales@smart-it.com.