The following is based on my ebook digital delight: Planning, measuring, and optimizing great digital customer experiences, available at: https://gregkihlstrom.com/digitaldelight

We are truly living in the age of customer experience.

I use the digital delight to describe the online customer experience but customer experience measurement isn’t just about digital, however. While we live in an increasingly digital world, to truly measure CX, we have to be able to measure both online and offline interactions. While we may use digital tools to do so, we can’t ever forget that customer experience is wherever the customer is, and whatever interaction they may be having. This would be an in-store conversation, a phone call to customer services, or, yes, a website or social media interaction.

With the proliferation of tools that allow better and more holistic design of customer experience and consumer journeys, comes an increased ability to measure, analyze, and optimize.

Think about the business impacts that the quality of your customer service affects. Things like revenue, cost to serve, profitability, and even employee satisfaction can be closely tied to CX performance.

Customer experience performance also influences behavioral outcomes such as buying, buying again, buying more, recommending to friends and other activities critical to an organization’s bottom line.

Sources of CX measurement

By measuring customer experience, you’re able to ensure that the entire company understands it as a holistic discipline that spans the organization. The two primary sources to gather data for customer experience measurement are the following:

Voice of the Customer (VoC)

What customers say they want think feel and do

Voice of Analytics (VoA)

What customers actually do and the systems they interact with during their experience

It’s important to measure and explore both of these sources to uncover the best methods of planning, building, measuring and optimizing customer experience for your organization.

Delight is the ultimate goal

While the indicators of a great customer experience are things like retention, customer lifetime value, and marketing campaign success, the ultimate goal is to delight customers.

Because where there are delighted customers, there are all sorts of benefits. Delighted consumers buy more, spend more time consuming information, tell more of their friends and colleagues, and are overall more valuable customers and brand advocates.

And while “delight” may seem aspirational to some, it should always be the ultimate goal of any customer experience effort.

The above is based on my ebook digital delight: Planning, measuring, and optimizing great digital customer experiences, available at: https://gregkihlstrom.com/digitaldelight