By Christian Buncher, Senior Digital Strategist at CI&T
There’s little doubt that a first-class customer experience (CX) is worth investing in. Research from Microsoft indicates that experience is chief among customer considerations, with 90% saying CX is important to their choice of (and loyalty to) a brand.
Conventional CX measurements — such as customer satisfaction surveys — are a good starting point on this front, but they don’t go far enough. If a business is to craft CX that delivers a competitive advantage, a more comprehensive approach to measurement and analytics is key.
Evangelical about measurement
To begin, business leaders must build a measurement framework based upon a set of customer parameters, to allow the reporting of CX effectiveness and performance.
Benchmarking the customers’ existing experience helps to track future improvements. This can be achieved by mapping your core customers using the jobs to be done method (JTBD) and plotting the pains they experience and their desired resolutions.
CX is felt across almost every aspect of a business — but quantifying its impact isn’t always easy. This is why it’s also important to have analytics built into your CX programmes, which should in turn be based on measurable outcomes.
From brand experience to user interface, OKRs to attitudinal and behavioural changes, every KPI of CX must be monitored in real time. These measurements can be conducted in a variety of ways: customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter (NPS) scores, retention and purchase loyalty, waiting times, and so on.
Creating an equal scoring mechanism
While all these tools, such as CSAT scores and Trustpilot reviews, are effective in their niche, none tell the true, wider story of your customer’s experience. The challenge then is not to introduce a new system, but to equalise and create a bespoke equal scoring mechanism that can apply to all the experience platforms in the technical ecosystem. This can be achieved through strategy and technology, with the introduction of an algorithm that resides in middleware and consumes multiple data points.
These multiple data points can be equalised using a customer job satisfaction scoring mechanism unique to your business. Then, the centralised scoring algorithm will determine and provide the equal measurement score, tracking how well served and satisfied customers are.
To truly put customers at the heart of what we do, we must engage with them directly to better understand their needs. These equalised insights provide a vital foundation, from which we can build better user experiences.
CX drives business outcomes
A connected, more intelligent CX can help achieve a host of business ambitions: increased audience engagement, better brand equity, and higher sales volumes. Fully understanding the ROI of an improved user experience is often tricky, however.
CX metrics can help with this. Rather than tackling perceived problems based on anecdotal evidence, a business can leverage reliable, quantifiable data to determine where the most profitable opportunities for improvement lie. Many large organisations use over 100 different metrics to measure their CX success alone.
To ensure the feedback obtained is useful, data should be fed into a Live Optimal Opportunity Experience Map (LOOEM)™. This is a line that tracks customer satisfaction against the jobs they are trying to achieve. Financial measures are overlaid to show how a job is affecting financial performance and provide triggers for development.
This method is particularly useful when a company is launching a new product or service. Going to market without a CX measurement system is a risky strategy: time and money might be wasted on features and functionality that fall short of customer interest.
Test, learn, and optimise
By utilizing CX measurements, a company can optimise its CX with confidence. Personalisation engines — systems that offer unique user services, such as sophisticated digital experience platforms (DXPs) — can, for instance, be informed by CX metrics to deliver an increasingly memorable, and pleasing encounter.
Businesses that fail to grasp the importance of CX software and measurability are at risk of falling foul of ‘bad data’: insights gleaned from generic, ill-designed surveys and other rudimentary engagement tools. Wide of the mark, this information will likely frustrate CX, repelling repeat business and undermining potentially lucrative relationships.
To this end, management must ensure alignment across all internal divisions, business units and territories. Once a cross-functional team is in tune with the correct customers, data and technologies, everyone can work towards a unified, easily understood metric of success.
Put the customer first with CX measurability
Measurements and technologies should be baked into all CX strategies. The world seems to be taking note — by 2025, 80% of large enterprises will have adopted marketing customer relationship management (CRM) software, up from 67% in 2020.
The companies that see success will be the ones with commercial designs that begin and end with customers’ needs. If a business’ goal is to build not just a product, service, or experience, but nurture a relationship that stands the test of time, a high level of CX measurability is fundamental.