The CX Score: Revolutionizing Customer Experience Measurement in Support

The Limitations of Traditional CSAT Surveys

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys have long been the standard for measuring customer experience in support teams. However, this traditional metric has significant limitations:

• Only captures feedback from a small percentage of customers (typically less than 10%)
• Often over-represents extreme opinions
• Provides limited actionable insights for improvement
• Can be manipulated or gamed by support teams
• Doesn't account for neutral experiences
• Focuses more on the metric itself rather than actual customer feedback

As Jared Ellis, Senior Director of Global Product at Culture Amp, explains:

"CSAT was becoming such a problematic metric because of all of the kind of angle that it was coming from. We're worrying more about the metric than we were about the feedback."

These limitations have left many support leaders searching for a better way to measure and improve customer experience. Enter the CX Score - a new AI-powered metric that aims to solve these core problems with CSAT.

Introducing the CX Score

The Customer Experience Score (CX Score) is a new AI-powered metric developed by Intercom that provides a more comprehensive and accurate measure of customer experience. Key features include:

• Full coverage across every conversation, not just survey responses
• Scores conversations from 1-5 based on resolution, sentiment, and service quality
• No surveys required - eliminates survey fatigue and bias
• Provides actionable insights in real-time
• Uncovers insights about both human and AI support performance

As Bobby Stapleton, Senior Director of Human Support at Intercom, explains:

"The CX scores are new AI powered metric that solves the core problems with CSAT. It gives you full coverage across every conversation, not just the ones that get a survey and it scores them from one to five based on resolution, sentiment, and service quality."

How the CX Score Works

The CX Score uses advanced AI and natural language processing to analyze every customer conversation and provide a score from 1-5. It takes into account three key factors:

1. Customer sentiment - Analyzes the emotional tone and language used throughout the conversation

2. Resolution status - Detects whether the customer's issue was fully resolved, even if not explicitly stated

3. Service quality - Evaluates factors like clarity, helpfulness, and response time

The AI model processes all of this information to generate an overall score for each conversation. These individual scores are then aggregated to produce the overall CX Score, which represents the percentage of conversations that received a 4 or 5 rating.

Importantly, the CX Score provides full coverage across all meaningful customer interactions - not just the small percentage who respond to surveys. For most companies, this results in 5x more rated conversations compared to traditional CSAT surveys.

Benefits of the CX Score

The CX Score offers several key benefits over traditional CSAT surveys:

Full Coverage

By analyzing every conversation, the CX Score provides a complete picture of customer experience - not just a small sample. This eliminates bias and gives a more accurate representation of overall performance.

No Surveys Required

The CX Score doesn't rely on customers filling out surveys, which eliminates survey fatigue and removes the bias of only hearing from customers with extreme opinions. It captures the silent majority that typically doesn't respond to surveys.

Real-Time Insights

Scores are generated in real-time as conversations happen, allowing teams to identify and address issues immediately. There's no lag waiting for survey responses to come in.

Actionable Feedback

Each rated conversation includes a summary explaining the score, providing specific and actionable feedback to improve performance.

Uncovers Hidden Insights

The comprehensive nature of the CX Score often reveals insights that were previously hidden, such as the true performance of AI agents compared to human support.

Eliminates Gaming

Since the score is generated automatically for all conversations, it removes the ability for support teams to manipulate or game the metric.

Implementing the CX Score: Insights from Culture Amp

Culture Amp, a leading employee experience platform, was one of the first companies to trial the new CX Score. Jared Ellis, their Senior Director of Global Product, shared some key insights from their experience implementing this new metric:

Addressing CSAT Pain Points

The CX Score came at a time when Culture Amp was experiencing significant pain points with traditional CSAT:

"I was having my team come to me a lot more frequently and the managers within my group kind of coming to me and talking about CSAT. What does this mean? This doesn't seem fair. This isn't giving me the insight I'm finding it really hard to coach on."

The lack of actionable insights from CSAT was making it difficult for managers to coach their teams effectively. The CX Score offered a potential solution to these challenges.

Initial Impressions

When first implementing the CX Score, Ellis was struck by how familiar yet improved it felt compared to CSAT:

"It felt very familiar. It felt like it was doing a very similar job to CSAT overall, which was, which is kind of the goal, right? It was, it's meant to be something that is predictive of a similar type measure as CSAT. And it, think what the surprise for me was is that it did. And the feedback that it was producing was something that was quite actionable, that was understandable."

This balance of familiarity and improvement made the transition smoother for the Culture Amp team.

Calibrating Targets

One challenge in implementing the CX Score was calibrating appropriate targets. Ellis explained their process:

"I effectively firstly did comparisons. So I looked at known good and not so good CSAT responses and compared what the customer experience score was actually producing to gauge whether there was an alignment there."

From there, they experimented with different targets, taking into account the new neutral category that wasn't present in CSAT scores. This process helped them establish meaningful benchmarks for the new metric.

Team Change Management

Introducing a new performance metric can be challenging for teams. Ellis focused on framing it as an opportunity for improvement:

"I tried to frame it from the we're going to try this. The CSAT, what you're used to is going to sit there in the background. It will still be there. We can literally turn this off at a blink of an eye and go back to a previous way. But we think this could be better."

This approach helped get buy-in from the team and positioned the change as a collaborative journey.

New Insights and Opportunities

One of the most valuable aspects of the CX Score for Culture Amp has been the insights it provides into neutral interactions:

"We now have this neutral ground where we're not doing something terrible here to that customer experience. The customer probably walks away and says, yeah, that was fine. But what we actually want is, yeah, that was great. And it's so interesting that we now get that opportunity."

This new category of feedback has opened up opportunities for improvement that weren't visible with traditional CSAT surveys.

Implementing the CX Score: Best Practices

Based on the experiences of early adopters like Culture Amp, here are some best practices for implementing the CX Score:

Start with a Trial Period

Run the CX Score alongside your existing CSAT metric for a period of time. This allows you to compare results and get comfortable with the new metric before fully switching over.

Calibrate Targets Carefully

Take time to calibrate appropriate targets for your team. Compare CX Scores to known good and bad interactions to establish meaningful benchmarks.

Focus on Trends Over Time

Pay attention to trends in your CX Score over time rather than fixating on day-to-day fluctuations. This will give you a more accurate picture of overall performance.

Use Insights for Coaching

Leverage the detailed feedback provided for each conversation to coach your team more effectively. Focus on specific areas for improvement rather than just the overall score.

Communicate Clearly with Your Team

Be transparent with your team about the switch to the CX Score. Frame it as an opportunity for improvement and bring them along on the journey.

Look for New Opportunities

Pay special attention to the new insights revealed by the CX Score, particularly around neutral interactions. Use these to identify new opportunities for improving customer experience.

The Future of Customer Experience Measurement

The CX Score represents a significant step forward in how support teams measure and improve customer experience. By leveraging AI to provide comprehensive, real-time insights without relying on surveys, it addresses many of the core limitations of traditional CSAT metrics.

As more companies adopt AI-powered metrics like the CX Score, we can expect to see a shift in how support teams operate and optimize their performance. The focus will likely move away from manipulating survey results and towards genuinely improving the customer experience across every interaction.

Ultimately, this evolution in measurement should lead to better outcomes for both customers and support teams. Customers will receive more consistent, high-quality support, while teams will have clearer, more actionable insights to guide their improvement efforts.

As Jared Ellis concludes:

"I think as leaders, think we have to be aware of it and start to consider it. There are thousands of metrics that we could, probably not thousands, but a lot of metrics we could take into consideration every day within our support organizations. We don't look at all of them. It's impossible. can't metric against all of them. We can't try and shift all of them in a positive direction. You would just end up running around in circles and actually getting nowhere. So we all have our favorites. I think you spoke about this at the, at the earlier on. We've all got our favorites and so, and we've also got the ones we don't necessarily like. The one thing that is, is true is we share an understanding of the majority of them together. And I think this is just might be the new kid on the block. But it's the kid that's going to hang around. It's going to grow up, it's going to go through school, and it's going to be here for us in the future. And it's probably going to redefine some other metrics. So it's worthwhile getting to know it."

For support leaders looking to stay ahead of the curve and deliver truly exceptional customer experiences, exploring AI-powered metrics like the CX Score is becoming increasingly essential. While it may require some adjustment and recalibration, the potential benefits in terms of insights, team performance, and ultimately customer satisfaction make it a worthwhile investment for forward-thinking support organizations.

Article created from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF8nxSXzdlo