Measuring the customer experience

Customer centricity should have a positive impact on the business result, as this is how products and services become more competitive. But how can this actually be measured? How do you document successes in the customer experience?

Achieving intermediate steps towards a major goal has a motivating effect, and also demonstrates that you’re still on the right track. If you cross the finish line in your first marathon, you can celebrate a major success. Smaller partial successes help you to persevere, such as after every five kilometres you manage to complete. Focusing the company completely on the customer is a similarly large goal. By using CX (customer experience) metrics, you can check whether you’re achieving the goals you set and can constantly review the path you’re taking.

CX metrics consist of four parts. These are directly linked, which means they can only work together:

• Outcome: the exact time a goal is achieved.
• Progress measurement: you measure where you are today, how far you’ve come and how much effort is still ahead to achieve the goal.
• Problem score: you measure the size of the problem and the extent of the economic damage posed by an obstacle you wish to overcome.
• Value recognition: you use existing data that helps you get closer to the goal.

Unfortunately, there is no single metric that you can use to measure experiences, which means you need to identify an individual metric for every problem you wish to solve.

The procedure is based on these steps: once you have understood the problem properly and objectively from the customer perspective, you define the desired outcome. In the next step, you design the approaches at various stages of maturity (progress measurement) and verify whether they are bringing you closer to the goal (outcome measurement).

Define the outcome:

The following phrasing can help with this: how can we improve the life of a person by delivering outstanding work and a well-designed product?

Progress measurement:

You can take the customer journey as the basis for this, for example, and measure how many of the individual steps you’ve covered towards the desired outcome and what you still need to do.

Problem score (“frustration costs”):

As you’re not “only” improving the lives of people but also want to positively impact the business result, you need to know which obstacles are preventing your users from achieving the desired outcome right now, and what these obstacles cost.

Examples:

• Losses in revenue
• Increased support and/or training costs
• Wasted development costs (e.g. for features that nobody uses)

Value recognition:

For this, you identify existing data you use to innovatively improve the experience of your users and therefore bring you closer to the desired outcome. A classic example from online retail is: “customers who bought product X often purchase product Y as well.”

Creating convincing CX metrics requires teamwork:

All of the stakeholder groups need to agree on the desired outcome in order to be successful. Different priorities will otherwise lead to conflicts and make achieving the goal more difficult.