All three measures tell you something different about the customer experience, and it’s important to identify exactly what it is you want to know and what gives you most value.  

For example, there is no point measuring NPS if you are a public service with no competition. Likewise, if you are measuring NPS you need to decide if your customers really are likely to recommend your product or service; if not don’t ask it. 

C-sat comes into its own when you want to measure the here and now, capturing customer sentiment about a specific interaction. C-sat also enables clear benchmarking and comparison against other channels, teams, products or services.  

Finally, customer effort is becoming increasingly valuable because ease of interacting with an organisation is now proven to have significant link to loyalty and increased lifetime spend. It also enables quick effective pin-pointing of high effort points in the journey which can then be analysed and improved add value to continuous improvement programmes.  

If you want to gather feedback about the quality of an agent or getting in touch with you, post-interaction surveys are most useful. These are are best done as close to the interaction as possible, often in a post call IVR, SMS or on social media. If you want to understand things on a longer term basis you can use less immediate channels such as email.

Understanding what your experience is like for your customers is extremely valuable if the insight is used effectively. Using analytics can speed up the process and tell you what is going on, through real-time dashboards. Backing this up with internal continuous improvement processes is a powerful combination.

Using the feedback you gather to make specific improvements can be tracked through a clear measurement framework. Most customer contact channels provide statistics on volumes and contact types and adding some commercials around that to provide a cost per contact will really help demonstrate ROI from the improvements you make.