Beth Coppinger, Senior Director Analyst with the Gartner Supply Chain practice, stressed the importance of customer experience metrics in the supply chain during this week’s Virtual Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo.
In a press statement promoting Gartner’s virtual conference, Coppinger explained why he believes customer metrics must be included when measuring the success of a supply chain:
“Supply chain leaders spend a lot of time working to understand and improve their internal operational metrics, but they rarely take the time to understand their impact on the customer. That’s why it’s important to introduce customer experience metrics into the supply chain scorecard. To drive excellence in customer experience, it’s important to measure service as the customer does. For example, the customer is more interested in having an item delivered on the requested day and time than having it shipped on time. So, the first step is to define and measure your success using the same metrics as your customer does.”
A Gartner survey of customer experience leaders conducted in 2019 found that over 60% of respondents’ 1st priority was to develop customer experience metrics and integrate them across all business units.
Given the importance of these metrics, Gartner have presented three different customer experience metrics suitable for supply chain organisations that represent “a good starting point”.
They are as follows:
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
In order to calculate the CSAT, Gartner explains that clients are promoted to rate the level of their satisfaction with a product, solution, or service. However, according to Gartner, one of this issues here is that the questions are often not standardized, which makes benchmarking a challenge.
One option Gartner point to is to utilise the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Using the ASCI, Gartner say a company moves by 1% roughly on average following a five year period. Moreover, the score movement for a one company is frequently under 2% in a 10-year time period. The conclusion drawn from this is that benchmarking against industry peers is more important than trying to improve the score.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
As Gartner explains, the purpose of the NPS is to work out if the customer is an advocate to drive growth and would recommend a specific product or service.
Although Gartner believe firms should strive for the best score possible all the time, they add that it is important to remember that cultural differences should be considered. To give an example, Coppinger mentions how those in the EMEA tend to give the highest satisfaction ratings much less frequently than clients in North or Latin America.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Finally, Gartner say the CES score is best suited to a service environment and evaluates how straightforward it is for customers to do business with an organization or deal with a problem.
You can read Gartner’s release in full here and learn about their virtual conference here
Photo by mohamed hassan form PxHere