Three Ways to Measure the Customer Experience
By Rob McDougall, President and co-founder, Upstream Works Software
There is a wealth of information in your company about customer experience. However, it's spread across technical silos in different departments under different managers with different goals. The consistent cry from industry professionals that I hear is that it’s difficult to correlate how you actually treat your customers with how that affects the bottom line or even how you provide services in the first place. Measuring the customer experience – cleanly and consistently, with quantitative and representative information is still the purview of the very large company with the very deep pockets.
Yet even in those situations, I hear massive inconsistencies:
- Companies who measure partial customer behaviors across a statistical subset of calls because it’s not practical to measure the complete experience across everything.
- People who are looking at the customer experience as a benchmarking number and not one that should be directly usable to improve that experience.
- People who ‘have it all’, yet who can’t substantiate the numbers they are reporting beyond a cursory evaluation, and who certainly don’t know how to identify savings for budgetary reductions or opportunities for increased revenue.
There are three ways of measuring the customer’s experience.
The first and most common method is used by almost everyone I know for measuring what people are willing to say to you – getting their solicited opinions through a formal survey process. Surveys come in all types – from live agents to email to interactive voice response. I'm sure most of the readers of this article are using them in some form or another. And every one of you, I’m sure, are also customers of an organization who is using surveys. If you've ever done any traveling, I'm sure you've gotten an email from the hotel, looking for your opinion of the service they’ve provided and to see how much you enjoyed the stay with them. Surveys are very common, and have the strong advantage of being inexpensive and channel independent.
People, however, don’t always fill out surveys. In fact, they usually don’t. Unless there was something that happened that was really great – that amazing moment of truth that we’re actively telling our friends about anyway – or something that was really bad and you want to complain about it, it’s unlikely you’ll take the time to fill out a survey. For the great majority of people it goes into the delete bin very quickly, and what you end up with is something called survey bias – the tendency of surveys to represent not the mainstream opinion, but rather to disproportionally reflect the outliers.
The next measurement revolves around the new, exciting stuff that everyone is talking about these days at conferences. Social media is really a hugely broad term for a collection of technologies and perceptions that people have, and can be applied in many different ways. Social media can impact customer experience by helping set the brand experience of the corporation through Facebook pages, “likes”, communities, etc. Many companies are also focused on so called ‘social response’ – how their customers interact with them publicly on social media channels like twitter - typically either complaints or kudos for something amazing. Some customer service issues are addressed this way as well, but large scale corporate social media involvement focuses on understanding and measuring what people say about you publicly. So unlike surveys where you have directed and solicited feedback to your face, social channels will deliver a different message because people will say things online behind a twitter ID that they wouldn’t say directly to you.
What people will say on social media sites is a kind of unsolicited survey feedback, and companies are starting to look at that information to understand how to engage with their customers.
With social media interactions, there are admittedly still a lot of unknowns about how to identify what people are saying; if it’s valid; who they are; and even how you get the information in some situations. But there is a tremendous amount of interest in understanding and controlling the customer experience via what is being said on social media. At a recent conference I attended, senior executives agreed that the number of social media interactions they had was immeasurably small; however the social interactions - because of their public nature - had a much larger impact on the organization than would normally be attributed to the channel given the low volumes. It is very much an exercise of viewing the squeaky wheels as windows into the customer experience and working to keep that under control.
The third method of evaluating the customer experience is the probably the most useful and rigorous mechanism for measuring the customer experience, but in most organizations it’s also the least well formulated and thought out way of looking at customer experiences.
The third method is actually measuring what people do.
Measuring what people do involves tracking every interaction that you have with your customers and actually measuring how and why they interact with agents, IVRs or even web self service. By understanding the details and trends of your customer interactions, you can start to analyze those details and determine where specifically you need to make corrections or improvements.
In a world where “customer experience is king”, “customer experience at any cost” is still not king. Customer experience needs to be evaluated for specific return on investment.
Understanding that saving 20 minutes on something that drives 100 calls a month doesn’t compare to saving 2 minutes per call on 10,000 calls a month for a different call reason is a key element of strategic improvement of the customer experience. So when you are looking at outlier survey respondents, or when you are evaluating the squeaky wheel on twitter, the business that wins is going to be the one who can quickly determine the cost / benefit associated with the experience and then plans accordingly.
Measuring what people do has a huge impact on the organization because it is the pure unadulterated view of what the experience actually is – what your customers are doing day in and day out. And really, nothing measures customer experience better than – well, measuring the customer’s experience!
The industry has focused heavily on surveys as the mechanism for measuring the customer experience. Forward thinkers are evaluating social media to determine how to best use that. But companies who are also spending their time strategically, measure what customers actually do for any interaction will be the ones with that full 360 degree view of customer experience and the ensuing direct and actionable information.
To learn more about this topic please go to: http://www.upstreamworks.com/index.php/learn-more/webinars/simplifying-cross-channel-customer-experience-management/
About the Author
Rob McDougall is the President and co-founder of Upstream Works Software, providers of business interaction management tools that make every interaction visible, accountable and controllable to businesses that view their customer service organization as a strategic competitive advantage.
Rob McDougall can be contacted at rmcdougall@upstreamworks.com; 905.660.0969 x358
About Upstream Works
Upstream Works delivers business interaction management to improve customer experience; reduce costs and improve retention. Upstream Works provide organizations with visibility, accountability and control over all customer interactions regardless of source.