Did you ever have to make up your mind?

How insurance companies can decide on which CX Metrics to use.

Customer experience (CX) metrics are important. Insurance companies can use them to:

communicate the rationale for previous investments
validate whether improvements to the customer experience have taken place
set goals and targets for future improvements
intervene when remedial action is needed

But there’s a problem.

In most insurance organizations it is difficult to get agreement on which metrics should be focused on in order to come up with effective plans to improve CX.

This factor is further complicated when you consider that the range of possible CX metrics is extensive.

For example, the majority of large organizations with revenue of more than $1 billion (or the equivalent) use more than 50 CX metrics—some use as many as 200.

To decide on which metrics matter most in terms of relative impact on the customer, insurance companies need to employ a 4-step process.

Step 1: Audit

The first step to evaluating which CX metrics to employ to enhance customer experience is to audit all of the customer experience metrics currently being used across the entire organization. The purpose of doing this is to determine what is being measured, how each metric is calculated and who is accountable for its improvement.

A thorough audit will take you beyond the departments that first come to mind i.e. marketing, customer service, operations, sales and supply chain. Keep in mind that digital commerce, HR, logistics, billing, procurement and finance also track a variety of CX metrics too that you should be analyzing.

When your audit is complete you will have gathered a large number of metrics. It may feel overwhelming. To help make managing the data more manageable, the majority of organizations will group the metrics into four categories:

Customer Satisfaction
Customer Loyalty/Retention/Churn
Advocacy/Reputation/Brand
Quality

Step 2: Build a Hierarchical Dashboard

Different departments within an insurance organization tend to focus on different CX metrics. However, if an insurance company is going to enhance or improve its overall customer experience it’s important for personnel throughout the organization to have visibility into the experience customers are having with all departments. By doing so employees will gain a complete understanding of the customer experience and how it may or may not impact their specific interactions.

To provide this bird’s eye view of the customer experience, insurance companies should combine all the relevant metrics into a customer experience dashboard. A CX dashboard captures the entire customer experience from as many different viewpoints as possible.

Typically, these dashboards have one or two high-level metrics at the top that the operating committee are interested in, such as overall customer satisfaction score, and then waterfalls down to include all of the operational metrics relevant to the customers experience.

Step 3: Cull the Herd

Once the hierarchical dashboard is filled out, review each metric from the perspective of your customer, and sort them in order from most critical to least critical when it comes to evaluating the customer experience.

The natural tendency for most organizations is to think from the inside out. When they do, they have a greater chance of relying on CX metrics that aren’t actually assessing the customer experience. This can lead to an initiative that’s reason for existence is to satisfy a business goal such as lowering costs, boosting revenue or increasing loyalty vs. a customer experience goal such as aiding the customer in buying or owning a product or service.

Think outside in. Think like a customer first and you’ll be able to clarify with colleagues when a metric is not a CX metric.

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

Step 4: Avoid Focusing on Executive-Level Customer Experience Metrics

Board level executives tend to focus their attention on metrics that summarize the overall customer experience; metrics such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customers Effort Score (CES). So it makes sense for a CX executive to do the same, right? Wrong.

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

The time it takes for average organizations to climb to the top of their industry, or those that are poor to climb up to average, is about four to five years. As a result, a CX executive is more likely to generate short-term wins by focusing their attention on improving several lower-level CX metrics.

By having multiple specific metrics to improve, you spread out the risk that they fail to improve i.e. they form a portfolio of projects that spread the risk of failure. More importantly, the cumulative effect of making small improvements tends to result in the top-level CX metrics improving, too.