Greg Kihlstrom

The following is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere. 

I’m sure you’ve run across this phrase at least a few hundred times: “Life’s a journey, not a destination.” It might be on a poster with some mountains, or an empty desert road, written in a script font in front of a sunset. Trust me, it’s been done to death. But that doesn’t make it untrue. You could say something similar about the customer experience—it’s definitely a journey, not a destination.

Because the definition of customer experience is an individual’s perception of their entire experience with a brand, CX itself isn’t defined by any single point within the beginning, middle, or end.

Additionally, from the company side of things, it is very important to not just understand what it takes to get a customer to complete a stage of a journey. It’s just as vital to understand and empathize with a customer at the many individual moments that occur during the journey.

In this article, I’m going to explore measurement and the customer journey so we can better understand how to effectively measure customer experience.

What happens after a sale?

Some would say that the real experience of being a customer begins after the first sale, with everything leading up to that being the equivalent of dating someone before moving in or getting married. Or, as I have often said, the real test of a relationship is when things go wrong, not when things are still in a “honeymoon” phase, whether that’s a real honeymoon or a figurative one.

By the same token, there are a number of moments and opportunities to win over a customer before that first sale, so you need to consider all of it.

All of this adds up to the need to clearly define and understand the process a customer goes through in order to learn about your product or service, choose it above your competitors, purchase it, and buy it again and/or refer it to their colleagues and friends.

This means that you need to map out your customer journey if you haven’t done so already.

Life’s a journey

Every organization I’ve worked with has their own slightly different definitions or delineations for the stages within  a customer journey, but most of them follow the one shown in the figure below (Figure 3.3.1) to some degree.

Figure 3.3.1, The Customer Journey

You can see that we’ve split the customer journey into the following stages:

1. Educate, where the buyer still has fundamental questions as to the exact challenge they need to solve, as well as the potential providers of solutions.

2. Influence, where the buyer has created a consideration set for brands and solutions, and is considering how each compares from a value perspective.

3. Acquire, where the buyer begins and eventually completes the process of purchasing the product or service, resulting in a sale for the brand.

4. Activate, where the buyer starts to use the product or service and has the opportunity to recommend it to others, purchase more products and services from the brand, or in some instances may run into technical difficulties which require customer service.

Now let’s explore some measurement considerations at each of the four stages in the journey.

Measurement considerations at each stage in the customer journey

You may have an overall metric you use to judge relative performance of customer experience from year to year, such as NPS, CSAT, CES, or all or some of the above. Regardless of that baseline metric, it is extremely important to be continually measuring, analyzing, and improving interactions with customers at each stage of the journey.

Let’s take a look at some of the considerations that should be made during the stages of the customer journey we defined earlier.

EDUCATE

As a customer is learning both about the problem they are trying to solve, as well as about your product, it is important to lead with information that educates (as the name of this stage suggests) more than sells. There will be plenty of time to make the sale and roll out all of your best marketing copy and offers. For the time being, however, you need to make sure that the customer knows what they need to buy in the first place, and positioning your brand as a helpful guide enables you to have a prime place once they are considering their options.

Metrics at this stage can include interactions with your thought leadership or educational materials, as well as inquiries at a high level about your product or service offerings. A well-educated buyer might reach out through some of these channels, but quickly identify themselves as belonging in the next stage.

INFLUENCE

At this next stage, you have an educated customer that needs to make a sometimes tough decision between several options, including your brand. This is the stage where you get more “marketing” heavy by providing personalized offers, and work more aggressively towards pushing to the next stage, which involves a purchase.

Make sure you find ways to identify if this buyer really belongs in this stage, or if they still need more education on their fundamental challenges. If you are able to do this, you will save a considerable amount of time and resources, and when you are able to educate the buyer, you’ll have a much easier sale on your hands. This process can be made much easier through customer journey orchestration tools, particularly if you are dealing with a large volume of customers.

ACQUIRE

You made the sale! Hold on, not so fast. This stage includes the entire sales process, and ends with the sale being made. Whether you are a B2B provider with a months-long sales process, or an e-commerce brand whose goal is the quickest checkout possible, it always takes a little more effort than you think it should to make the sale.

It is important to have metrics associated with buyers starting this process, and measuring how long it takes, what issues were encountered, and more. Again, regardless of the amount of time it takes and the people, processes, and technology involved in making the sale, there is a wealth of information to be gained.

While there are plenty of customer-facing metrics, both quantitative and qualitative, to capture during this stage, this is also one where the internal aspects, or product and process, are incredibly important. The last thing you want is for a small but critical point to be missed, take too long, or malfunction when a buyer is ready to buy!

ACTIVATE

Wait, aren’t we done after that last stage? Of course not. The sale can really be thought of as the beginning of a new relationship. A prospect now becomes a customer and many opportunities await. The customer experience measurement at this stage includes their behaviors using your product or service, their referral and word of mouth behavior, as well as whether they choose to purchase from your organization again.

This means that you have several teams working in parallel paths. For instance, in a B2B setting, you might have a customer success team working with a customer to ensure they are getting onboarded and extracting as much value as possible from your product in the first 30 days. Then, you have a marketing team that wants to cross-sell, up-sell, or get the customer to spread the word to their colleagues to increase the overall customer value. Finally, you might have a customer service or technical support team that addresses issues or questions when there is a real or perceived problem. This doesn’t even take into account any other potential teams, such as technical integration, or third parties that may be involved.

Suffice to say, there is a lot going on across many teams in your organization at this stage. It is critical that you have both an overall measure of success, as well as individual measures and goals for each of those teams. Your processes and governance of CX will unite these teams in their actions.

As you can see, there are so many opportunities throughout the customer journey in order to influence CX for the better, and just as many opportunities to measure the effectiveness at each of these stages. Through strategic planning and prioritization, you can make the most of this potential wealth of information.

This article is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere.

The following is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere. 

In the last article in this series we explored the first category of internal customer experience metrics: product metrics. Now, we have the second of the two internal subcategories of customer experience metrics, which are the process metrics, as shown in the figure below (Figure 2.7.1).

 Figure 2.7.1, Quantitative measurement as defined in the CX measurement framework

Definition

Process metrics can be defined as the workflows and systems that enable a customer experience to occur. This includes how long it takes to respond to a customer request, or the number of steps or “hands” that need to touch a request in order for it to be fulfilled. A lot of this is based around efficiency and waste.

Examples

Here are a few examples of process metrics as they relate to customer experience:

• How long it takes to respond to a customer request

• The number of steps it takes or “hands” that need to touch a request across teams, departments, or partners

• The frequency and process by which products or processes related to customer experience are analyzed and improved

• The speed by which improvements to customer experience tools, platforms, and processes are designed, tested, and launched

How to Measure

Here are a few examples of how to measure process metrics for customer experience:

• Time to solution for improvements to customer experience processes and platforms

• Efficiency and productivity, including cost savings and/or revenue gains

• Indirect methods such as increased purchases and customer satisfaction

Opportunities

Process measurement provides the biggest opportunity to have long-term sustainable gains and improvements in customer experience and satisfaction. Just as methods such as lean manufacturing or agile software development became game changers in those (and many other) areas of business, investments in customer experience process measurement and improvement ensure that what might be a good CX today doesn’t stagnate and become less effective over time.

Challenges

Measurement of process is probably the least direct of the four subcategories when it comes to tying improvements to customer experience gains. Thus, it can be one of the hardest to justify continued investment in, unless an organization is driven by a strong agile, lean, Six Sigma, or similar mindset.

The last category of customer experience in the framework helps organizations continually analyze and improve CX across people, processes, and technology. While the ultimate measure of any of these methods is customer satisfaction and return on experience (which we will explore in the next article in this series), being able to break CX measurement down into these parts gives insights that might simply get lost otherwise.

In the next article, we’re going to discuss how to tie all of these customer experience metrics together to measure and calculate return on experience.

This article is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere.

The following is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere. 

In the last two articles in this series, we explored two external, or customer-facing categories of customer experience metrics: quantitative and qualitative. Now we are going to move from the external, or customer-facing customer experience metrics, to the internal metrics. We will start with product metrics, as shown in the figure below (Figure 2.6.1).

Figure 2.6.1, Quantitative measurement as defined in the CX measurement framework

Definition

Product metrics include the tools and services the organization produces for customers. Thus product metrics can be defined as how a product or service performs, such as the up-time of a mobile app or website, or the effectiveness of search engine functionality. These types of measurements are often diagnostic in nature.

Examples

Here are a few examples of product metrics as they relate to customer experience:

• Mobile app or e-commerce website up-time

• Effectiveness of search functionality in FAQs/knowledgebase

• Wait time in-store, online, or on a customer service line

How to Measure

Here are a few examples of how to measure product metrics for customer experience:

• Analytics tools for web and mobile applications

• Diagnostic tools for system performance

• Customer service metrics such as queue times

Opportunities

Product metrics are ones that an organization often has direct control over, and they are most often objective, quantitative ones. This means that as long as the important metrics are well-defined, and measurement platforms are in place, they can be measured with relative ease.

This type of internal measurement also gives companies an opportunity to get out ahead of potential issues by seeing, and in some cases anticipating, them in advance of an issue that might create a poor customer experience.

Challenges

There are obvious cases such as an e-commerce website being unavailable, or content not loading in a mobile app, where customers will complain, or simply go elsewhere and not purchase from your company if they occur. Outside of those examples, you might not hear from your customers about some of the challenges they face, because your product or service metrics are not something that is as directly understood by consumers.

Instead, the onus is on your product and service teams to measure and identify existing and potential issues and stay on top of them as promptly as they can. Ideally, this would be before your customers even notice.

This can sometimes be a challenge because many products and platforms that affect your customers are managed by teams outside of the customer experience, success, or service departments. Whether it is marketing, IT, or any other number of teams, product metrics and issues with products often require collaborative solutions. Depending on how closely teams are aligned, and how much of a priority CX is across all teams, this can prove more of a roadblock than it should. When you add other partners and third party platforms to the mix, this can provide even greater complexity.

Product metrics provide an internal window into what your customers are experiencing and also provide a direct method for your teams to make meaningful improvements to key processes within the customer journey. You shouldn’t wait for customers to start complaining or for sales to drop off to measure, analyze and build processes to improve them. Get ahead of these potential challenges before your customers even realize they could have it better!

In the next article in this series, we are going to discusss process metrics for customer experience. 

This article is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere.

The following is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere. 

In the last article in the series, we explored quantitative customer experience metrics. Let’s now explore qualitative customer experience metrics, which will be the second subcategory of CX measurements within the framework, as shown in the figure below (Figure 2.5.1).

Figure 2.5.1, Quantitative measurement as defined in the CX measurement framework

Definition

If you are new to qualitative metrics, let’s compare them to quantitative metrics. While quantitative measurements are objective, verifiable numbers such as how many sales were made, or how many visits were made to a web page, qualitative metrics are based on someone’s subjective opinion. For instance, qualitative measurements include asking your customers what their experience was like in terms of good or bad, which is not as easy to interpret and assess. It’s like asking someone if they liked their cup of coffee. All of that depends on whether they like light or dark roast, hot or iced, sugar and cream or none, or any of the other myriad combinations possible.

Thus, qualitative measurements are those that can be subjectively measured like Net Promoter Scores (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), or things like sentiment analysis and other similar types of metrics.

Examples

Here are a few examples of qualitative metrics as they relate to customer experience:

• Net Promoter Score question(s), such as “How likely are you to recommend this product or service?”

• Other types of survey questions and responses

• Sentiment analysis on social media comments

How to Measure

Here are a few examples of how to measure qualitative metrics for customer experience:

• Customer surveys, which can include measurements for NPS and CSAT

• Focus groups

• Other feedback mechanisms

• Sentiment analysis tools

Opportunities

Qualitative measurements can be helpful because sometimes objective measurements are simply not enough to tell a story. For instance, a customer can make it through a shopping experience which counts as a successful sale, but if they were made miserable every step of the way, they are unlikely to return or refer others. Thus, getting their subjective opinion can add insight in order to provide a better understanding.

Also, while I stated earlier in this book that qualitative measurements like NPS or CSAT shouldn’t be the only methods your organization uses to measure customer experience, these types of qualitative measurements can be extremely useful when you look at them as a relative point over time.

In other words, if you are measuring Net Promoter Score, and have been for many years, you can look at it as an important baseline measurement that you can use to see upswings and downswings over time. Used this way, they are an extremely helpful indicator that something is either going very well or very poorly.

Challenges

The thing to remember with qualitative customer experience measurements is that they are an individual’s opinion, at a specific point in time. Both of those factors are worth discussing, albeit briefly.

An individual’s opinion about how their customer experience should proceed is useful information, but as every individual is unique in their own way, so is their expectation of what the optimal CX should be. In the aggregate, this is less of an issue because trends tend to normalize with a higher volume of inputs, but taken one-off, an anecdotal piece of evidence can sometimes skew internal perceptions about what may be either right or wrong.

The second component here is the fact that this is data gathered at a specific point in time. For instance, a customer may be extremely happy (or extremely upset) by the end of a process, but there might have been many things that went wrong (or well) throughout. If you only measure an individual’s opinion one time throughout the process, you’re really only gathering information about their feelings at a single point. I’m simplifying this here, of course, because good or bad experiences are built from multiple touchpoints, but it is also important to note that you may have extreme challenges at certain points in your customer journey that your buyers simply overlook because they made it through the process. Shoring up those gaps earlier in the process are still critical, because not all customers are alike, either. Some may be more affected by setbacks early on, or have longer memories!

Qualitative metrics are essential to understanding customer perceptions of your organization’s customer experience. As long as they are balanced with other metrics, including the quantitative ones, as well as the internal metrics we’ll be discussing in the two articles that follow in this series, they provide good context that is difficult to measure otherwise.

This article is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere.

The following is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere. 

 We’re going to start with the first of two of our customer-facing, or external sub-categories of measurement: quantitative measurement, as shown in the figure below (Figure 2.4.1).

 Figure 2.4.1, Quantitative measurement as defined in the CX measurement framework

With each of these measurements, we’re going to explore them according to five dimensions, which consist of the following:

• Definition of the type of measurement

• Examples of metrics that fit the description

• How to measure, including methods and platforms that can be used

• Opportunities that measurement of this type provides

• Challenges in measuring this type of metric

The important thing to remember is that no single subcategory should be the only method that you use to measure customer experience.

Definition

Quantitative measurements are things that can be objectively measured, like repeat purchases, referrals, visits, or complaints. While this is often the easiest set of things to measure in terms of discrete metrics (e.g. Google Analytics can provide the number of page views, or your email platform can measure click-through rates on a campaign), it must be tied to multiple touchpoints and/or platforms to be most meaningful.  

Examples

Here are a few examples of quantitative metrics as they relate to customer experience:

• Repeat purchases

• # of complaints

• # of referrals

• In-store purchases through a loyalty program

• Calls to a customer service hotline

• Customer churn rate

How to Measure

It can be said that quantitative metrics can be some of the easiest to measure because they are numbers taken directly from interactions, though that can sometimes be misleading. Measurement and analysis of the most meaningful ones often takes more effort, statistical analysis, or the combination of several metrics to tell the story of a customer journey (or at least the full story of one stage within the journey) . Here are a few examples of how to measure quantitative metrics for customer experience:

• Analytics tools such as website or web application statistics

• Customer relationship management (CRM) tools and analysis

• Other sales data platforms

• Customer service/call center measurement data

Opportunities

Quantitative metrics provide an objective (i.e. “the numbers don’t lie”) method of gaining insight into your customers that can help build a comprehensive view of how they are interacting with your brand and your people, processes, and platforms throughout the customer journey. Because there are many tools available to capture quantitative data, the initial step of data collection can often have a low barrier to entry.

When measured and processed in real-time, quantitative metrics can also provide the foundations for a uniquely personalized customer experience. Real-time insights and customer journey orchestration can help set your organization apart from your competitors, and provide the type of personalized that customers have come to expect from the brands they purchase from.

Challenges

As I mentioned earlier, there are a myriad of quantitative metrics that you can collect in order to analyze. A challenge that often occurs, however, is that looking at one quantitative metric in isolation rarely tells the whole story.

This means that you often need to collect data from multiple sources and find methods to combine them to produce a clearer picture of the customer experience. Many organizations are undergoing digital transformation initiatives to make this easier, and as anyone who has undergone one of these types of transformations will attest, it is not a quick or inexpensive process. It is, however extremely valuable to be able to piece together all of your data points, quantitative and otherwise.

Quantitative customer experience metrics are a critical part of your measurement. Your organization’s ability to directly measure them, and analyze them to tell the story of your customer’s journey, makes them valuable in providing objective data about where there are challenges and opportunities, or strengths and weaknesses, in your CX program.

In the next article in this series, we will discuss qualitative measurements of customer experience. 

This article is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere.

The following is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere. 

I’m sure you’ve run across this phrase at least a few hundred times: “Life’s a journey, not a destination.” It might be on a poster with some mountains, or an empty desert road, written in a script font in front of a sunset. Trust me, it’s been done to death. But that doesn’t make it untrue. You could say something similar about the customer experience—it’s definitely a journey, not a destination.

Because the definition of customer experience is an individual’s perception of their entire experience with a brand, CX itself isn’t defined by any single point within the beginning, middle, or end.

Additionally, from the company side of things, it is very important to not just understand what it takes to get a customer to complete a stage of a journey. It’s just as vital to understand and empathize with a customer at the many individual moments that occur during the journey.

In this article, I’m going to explore measurement and the customer journey so we can better understand how to effectively measure customer experience.

What happens after a sale?

Some would say that the real experience of being a customer begins after the first sale, with everything leading up to that being the equivalent of dating someone before moving in or getting married. Or, as I have often said, the real test of a relationship is when things go wrong, not when things are still in a “honeymoon” phase, whether that’s a real honeymoon or a figurative one.

By the same token, there are a number of moments and opportunities to win over a customer before that first sale, so you need to consider all of it.

All of this adds up to the need to clearly define and understand the process a customer goes through in order to learn about your product or service, choose it above your competitors, purchase it, and buy it again and/or refer it to their colleagues and friends.

This means that you need to map out your customer journey if you haven’t done so already.

Life’s a journey

Every organization I’ve worked with has their own slightly different definitions or delineations for the stages within  a customer journey, but most of them follow the one shown in the figure below (Figure 3.3.1) to some degree.

Figure 3.3.1, The Customer Journey

You can see that we’ve split the customer journey into the following stages:

1. Educate, where the buyer still has fundamental questions as to the exact challenge they need to solve, as well as the potential providers of solutions.

2. Influence, where the buyer has created a consideration set for brands and solutions, and is considering how each compares from a value perspective.

3. Acquire, where the buyer begins and eventually completes the process of purchasing the product or service, resulting in a sale for the brand.

4. Activate, where the buyer starts to use the product or service and has the opportunity to recommend it to others, purchase more products and services from the brand, or in some instances may run into technical difficulties which require customer service.

Now let’s explore some measurement considerations at each of the four stages in the journey.

Measurement considerations at each stage in the customer journey

You may have an overall metric you use to judge relative performance of customer experience from year to year, such as NPS, CSAT, CES, or all or some of the above. Regardless of that baseline metric, it is extremely important to be continually measuring, analyzing, and improving interactions with customers at each stage of the journey.

Let’s take a look at some of the considerations that should be made during the stages of the customer journey we defined earlier.

EDUCATE

As a customer is learning both about the problem they are trying to solve, as well as about your product, it is important to lead with information that educates (as the name of this stage suggests) more than sells. There will be plenty of time to make the sale and roll out all of your best marketing copy and offers. For the time being, however, you need to make sure that the customer knows what they need to buy in the first place, and positioning your brand as a helpful guide enables you to have a prime place once they are considering their options.

Metrics at this stage can include interactions with your thought leadership or educational materials, as well as inquiries at a high level about your product or service offerings. A well-educated buyer might reach out through some of these channels, but quickly identify themselves as belonging in the next stage.

INFLUENCE

At this next stage, you have an educated customer that needs to make a sometimes tough decision between several options, including your brand. This is the stage where you get more “marketing” heavy by providing personalized offers, and work more aggressively towards pushing to the next stage, which involves a purchase.

Make sure you find ways to identify if this buyer really belongs in this stage, or if they still need more education on their fundamental challenges. If you are able to do this, you will save a considerable amount of time and resources, and when you are able to educate the buyer, you’ll have a much easier sale on your hands. This process can be made much easier through customer journey orchestration tools, particularly if you are dealing with a large volume of customers.

ACQUIRE

You made the sale! Hold on, not so fast. This stage includes the entire sales process, and ends with the sale being made. Whether you are a B2B provider with a months-long sales process, or an e-commerce brand whose goal is the quickest checkout possible, it always takes a little more effort than you think it should to make the sale.

It is important to have metrics associated with buyers starting this process, and measuring how long it takes, what issues were encountered, and more. Again, regardless of the amount of time it takes and the people, processes, and technology involved in making the sale, there is a wealth of information to be gained.

While there are plenty of customer-facing metrics, both quantitative and qualitative, to capture during this stage, this is also one where the internal aspects, or product and process, are incredibly important. The last thing you want is for a small but critical point to be missed, take too long, or malfunction when a buyer is ready to buy!

ACTIVATE

Wait, aren’t we done after that last stage? Of course not. The sale can really be thought of as the beginning of a new relationship. A prospect now becomes a customer and many opportunities await. The customer experience measurement at this stage includes their behaviors using your product or service, their referral and word of mouth behavior, as well as whether they choose to purchase from your organization again.

This means that you have several teams working in parallel paths. For instance, in a B2B setting, you might have a customer success team working with a customer to ensure they are getting onboarded and extracting as much value as possible from your product in the first 30 days. Then, you have a marketing team that wants to cross-sell, up-sell, or get the customer to spread the word to their colleagues to increase the overall customer value. Finally, you might have a customer service or technical support team that addresses issues or questions when there is a real or perceived problem. This doesn’t even take into account any other potential teams, such as technical integration, or third parties that may be involved.

Suffice to say, there is a lot going on across many teams in your organization at this stage. It is critical that you have both an overall measure of success, as well as individual measures and goals for each of those teams. Your processes and governance of CX will unite these teams in their actions.

As you can see, there are so many opportunities throughout the customer journey in order to influence CX for the better, and just as many opportunities to measure the effectiveness at each of these stages. Through strategic planning and prioritization, you can make the most of this potential wealth of information.

This article is based on ideas from my recent book, Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience, now available everywhere.