Measuring digital customer experience: CX Mini Masterclass – E87

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

And an added note to those who are already CCXPs. The Customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcasts listening towards certification renewal credits. So be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 87, the first episode of June 2020.

It’s undeniable that digital experiences are becoming a larger and larger part of customer experience. We’re doing more through our phones and devices, and I would not be surprised if the current COVID-19 health crisis had a lasting impact on shifting trends even more in this direction. With that in mind, customer experience professionals need to be prepared to understand and leverage the right metrics and measures for these experiences. For some, this will be new territory.

So, I wanted to do a quick overview of some of the most important and popular metrics and measures for digitally based customer experiences. User experience teams often use these already. So, if you have a digital experience in your company, your digital operations or marketing team may already be capturing this stuff. But data is only as good as what it’s used for.

So, I’m going to give you an overview of what’s measured and how it can be used in the service of improving customer experience. So, if you are looking for some ideas about how to leverage digital experience metrics and measures to better understand the holistic customer journey, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and here’s something that you like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

As we all know, so many experiences now happen in the digital realm. Whether it’s through a website, an app, or via social media, most customer journeys have become at least somewhat digitized, and I think it’s safe to say that’s becoming more of the case with each passing year. Within this context, we as customer experience professionals need to understand how to integrate our understanding of experiences through these touch points into our larger knowledge of the overall customer journey. These metrics for digital experiences aren’t new.

Most of them have been around for a while. Often they’re used by digital operations, marketing, or user experience teams. But it’s high time that we harness them as well. I’ll say before I dive into this, that there are a lot of digital experience metrics out there.

There’s no way that I’d be able to cover all of them in one Mini Masterclass. So I’ve selected a handful from different types of digital touch points based on both their prevalence and their usefulness in a customer experience context. I wouldn’t want to send you on a wild goose chase after metrics that are difficult to gather or to share measures that have little meaning in the customer experience context. So I’m not going to do that.

I’ve curated this list with the needs of customer experience professionals in mind. Let’s start at a high level with engagement. How many customers are accessing a particular channel or touch point? From a web context, the key measure would be page views, session duration, and bounce rate.

A bounce is any visitor who lands on a page but doesn’t take any action. And it’s not always a bad thing. Websites and apps can also track detailed behavior flows or how customers navigate different pages and actions. These measures are basically the digital equivalent of footfall and conversion.

But the context of digital enables us to get so much more information about how consumers act and what interests them. Often this data can be tracked back to a specific user, so you can build a picture of their interactions over time. Because many of these measures relate back to the sales funnel, I find that marketing teams are a helpful first port of call if you’re going to be looking for website experience data in your organization. Sticking with marketing related data for a moment, I’d like to quickly touch on a couple of email marketing metrics.

Because believe it or not, this still plays an important role in customer experience, especially for trying to stitch together an entire journey. There are a number of metrics and measures applicable to email. Some of the most popular ones include open rate, which tells us if people are reading a message, the unsubscribe rate, the sharing or forwarding rate, and the click-through rate, which tells us if customers are engaging with any of the calls to action within messages. Some marketing teams put together timelines of customer engagement across email, text, call, and other notifications.

Of these, the digital touch points should yield the most readily available information about engagement. But remember that just because someone received a communication doesn’t always mean that they engage with it. That said, it’s helpful for us, as customer experience professionals, to understand these points of interaction as they play a role in the journey. Email feels old school these days, so moving a bit more into the current age, let’s also look at the key measures related to social media.

Within social media, I think we can look at customer engagement through two different lenses. A push lens and a pull lens. Marketing teams love to measure the success of their curated content through metrics like social share of voice, mentions compared to competitors, the engagement rate relative to total followers, and the applaud rate, which tracks approval actions, likes, favorites, and whatnot. These give us a glimpse into customer engagement with an organization’s social media presence and outbound messaging.

This data helps us understand possible points of interaction with a brand and where consumers might be getting information about products and services. Increasingly, social media is also being used to provide service support and even to sell to customers. Standard sales and service metrics are measures like conversion rate, response time, resolution time, first contact resolution, can all apply to social media touch points, as well as email, messenger, or really wherever sales and support are offered. Advanced text analytics also provides organizations with the ability to evaluate sentiment and to do topic analysis to understand trends in the nature of engagement through social media and other channels.

Finally, let’s take a look at some metrics for usability testing, which is especially important if we’re hoping to understand an app based experience or a web portal. Some place where a customer might go to complete one of their jobs to be done. Something like paying a cell phone bill or checking a credit card statement. These same metrics and measures can be used for transaction-based experiences as well.

But I just wanted to highlight that they’re really great for understanding the digital customer journey after the point of conversion. These usability metrics are all based on a user’s experience completing a specific task. So, you’ll need to identify that task first. Once you know what task you’re evaluating, you can assess task completion rate, which is just what it sounds like, the error rate or how many times a customer made an error or had to repeat an action.

You can also look into the average time to complete a task. Generally speaking, and this will come as no surprise, customers want things to be quick, easy, and seamless. So, you’ll want digital experiences that enable quick task completion with minimal errors and low abandon rates. If you have the ability to reach out to customers and gather, say, a customer effort score or a customer satisfaction score that’s also associated with the same job to be done, these customer experience metrics can add a nice robustness to a team’s understanding of the experience, how it worked, and then how customers feel about it.

If you’re scratching your head about where to get the user experience data, I’d head straight to your digital operations team. They should be able to pull samples of this information if they don’t have it on hand already. As you can imagine, digital experience data in general can be a veritable goldmine of insights about parts of the customer journey that have moved into the digital realm. And it’s even more powerful if we have the ability to connect it back to experiences that are offline, things that happen in person, like retail shopping or calling a contact center.

Sadly, I see the data most often lives within the silo where it was created or gathered. But customer experience professionals can be the ones to bring the pieces together, or at least raise the flag about the importance of establishing a single view of customer experience across touch points. The data gathered by each organization is different. But I hope that this mini masterclass has at least equipped you to understand what might be available and some of the lingo if you decide to go to your colleagues in marketing or digital operations and ask them to collaborate with you.

If you are looking for help uniting customer data from across your organization to create a holistic understanding of the customer journey, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, Tweet or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share it with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show. I’ll be back next week with another episode.

I’ll see you then.