Exceptional customer experience (CX) will make a difference, even during a pandemic. While it’s one thing to want to improve CX, seeing things work out as intended is another thing entirely.

Although businesses have always struggled to fill the communication gap between clients, the current coronavirus has made delivering a superb customer experience even much trickier.

If you’re struggling to monitor customer perceptions about your brand, below are five ingenious ways you could measure customer experience amid the coronavirus crisis;

There’s a reason why survey ranks high among our service offerings here at DSG Associates. Customer surveys can be done online or via phone, and they can provide powerful insights into your customers’ experience while interacting with your brand, products, and services.

One of the key metrics you want to look out for when analyzing customer satisfaction surveys is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS is a measure of how willing a customer is to promote your brand to their friends. In all, analysis of the survey results will help shape your decisions going forward as you strive to improve CX for your clients.

The coronavirus crisis has got many businesses operating in crisis mode. Therefore now, more than ever, there is a need to maintain and improve excellent service delivery.

Mystery shopping opportunities use predetermined scenarios to evaluate the execution of sales and service behaviors. This is crucial because how employees handle these things can impact sales conversion. And even more importantly they can affect customer loyalty and retention.

PR Daily, a site that provides educational resources for social media and marking professionals, indicated that as many as two-thirds of small business PR professionals use social media to monitor their organization’s reputation. And while media monitoring is a great way to start, brands have to take even more active steps to monitor conversations around their brands online, whether positive or negative.

Prospective customers will most often base their assertions on the research they make prior to transacting with your business. You don’t want to ruin the experience before it even begins. So, keeping an eye on your brand reputation and taking active steps to shape the conversations positively will go a long way. Tracking public reviews easily come to mind in this case.

COVID has caused a shift in customer service volumes.

There’s a high chance your customer support team has seen a flurry of support tickets driven in part by the current crisis. You might want to analyze these tickets to discover recurring trends.

This will give you a chance to review these issues to see whether there can be a solution to improve customer experience across the board. Going forward, this will help you reduce customer support issues while helping to improve customer experience significantly.

Mystery shoppers can help you evaluate issues within your customer journey that has to do with your website’s user experience.

Mystery customers can be very beneficial when you need to analyze how these things might be impacting your average customer’s experience on your site.

Finally, there is also an opportunity in creating avenues to proactively seek customer suggestions on products. This can be done via your website, email, or via customer surveys. You definitely don’t have to implement all of these customer suggestions, but it will give you an idea of your customers’ main pain points, making it much easier to address the issues.

COVID has been a tragedy on many levels, but it’s not enough to excuse poor customer service with your competitors lurking around. To deliver the best experience for your customers, you need powerful insights into their journey. Some of the services we offer such as customer surveys, mystery shops and calls, and some of the other recommendations in this post will help you understand customer perception about your brand. This is the best starting point if you care about, and actually want to improve customer experience. And with customer loyalty, retention, sales, profit, and business growth at stake, who wouldn’t?