Measuring total customer experiences from all touch points, rather than “assuming customer satisfaction” and sharing this information company-wide allows you to implement and execute upon strategies for future success. It might be a tricky task and take overwhelmingly lot of time. Here are three suggestions for you to success:

1. Capture feedback continuously

Trends and cause-and-effect are things that drivers of your success in measuring customer experiences. A survey launched once or twice a year often just doesn’t cut it, especially when you’re trying to assess how customers feel about say a shopping experience, dealing with your sales associates, or how the store environment feels to them. These characteristics can change over time, vary by region, or change based on who is managing the stores. If you can capture the feedback continuously, and make some operational changes based on the feedback, you should be able to see positive changes in customer satisfaction or customer experience levels over time

2. Capture enough detail that you can take action

It’s not enough to have your customers simply rate you on satisfaction by giving you a score out of 5. If they give you a low score, you know that there’s a problem, but you don’t know why. Give them room to explain why – in a comment box – or just create a logic that will automatically ask more when you receive low score feedback. You may be able to look for groups of keywords that keep popping up in the text, such as “no follow-ups” or “long wait-times”. The “why” will provide you with information that makes the response actionable.

3. Quantity counts

Capture enough responses in order to detect significant differences between categories. You need a statistically-valid sample size to be able to attribute your findings to the entire population. Statisticians will tell you that you need 389 responses in a specific category, to have a 10% margin of error in your results. Businesses can get by with a 10% error margin – healthcare typically needs 5%, or 1,568 responses. So say, for example, that you’re measuring customer satisfaction at the store level, in order to say that Store A had a significantly better customer satisfaction score than Store B, you need 389 responses to be able to draw this conclusion, with 90% accuracy. If you have less than 389 responses for a single category, say store, or gender, or first-time shoppers, you can’t draw any reliable conclusions from your findings because the margin of error will be too large.

So you can see that by following these three basic rules you can collect a solid base of customer experience feedback from which to make informed decisions with confidence. Anything less, and your assumptions may come back to haunt you. If you are interested in strategy and technology that can improve your customer experience management, and are looking to acquire the knowledge to improve your customer experience, us or comment below!

– Jaakko