Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience

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

If you ask most business leaders what their primary measures of success are, they can probably tell you pretty easily. But when they are given reports with statistics on a regular basis, the information presented starts to cloud the judgment of those reading those reports. In other words, if you are shown a specific set of measurements on a weekly basis for a good amount of time, you may start to believe those numbers are more important than they may be in reality. Meaningful measurements are needed to make substantial decisions in business, and we need to be careful about the data that influences those decisions.

 In my years running Carousel30, my digital experience agency I started in 2003 and sold in 2017, I worked with clients in many industries and with many different challenges. We had a strong focus on showing measurable results, whether it was for a digital marketing campaign, a website redesign, or any other number of projects. Similar to what I shared in the opening to this article, what I found when reviewing statistics and metrics with clients is that the numbers that my team and I chose to present to our clients were deemed as the important ones. Some clients pushed back on this and corrected us if they thought there were more important KPIs we should be measuring, while others took our word for it, for better or worse.

While at this point which metrics were shown for which project and to which client are not important, the lesson is this: teams perform at their best when they are aligned on what the measures of success are, and that those measures have a direct impact on key business objectives.

If you’ve started reading this article as you have, you no doubt are on board with the importance of measuring customer experience in order to understand what customers’ perceptions are, where to make improvements, and how your organization can make the best use of the resources available. In this article, I’m going to define what I mean by meaningful measurement. 

What is the role of meaningful measurement?

Not every metric and data point you collect may fulfill the definition I provide for meaningful measurement. The purpose of providing this category of measurements is to provide customer experience professionals with a set of metrics that translate directly into descriptions of solutions to key business challenges that drive bottom-line decisions. In other words, even if customer experience is a priority in your organization, you will still need to justify to executive stakeholders, shareholders, and potentially others, why you need further resources, or why you are performing exceptionally (and ideally both).

Meaningful measurements, then, will give you the ammunition that you need to help your organization do its best work and continue moving towards a more customer-centric culture.

What do we mean by meaningful measurement?

First, we can define who it is to be meaningful to. In this case, we are concerned with value to the organization. So a meaningful measurement is one that is impactful to the business. 

For a measurement to be meaningful to a business, it must be impactful to the bottom line, be usable by others within the organization, able to be acted upon, and able to be replicated in the future.  It is from these requirements that I have created four dimensions of meaningful measurements for customer experience.

Let’s explore meaningful measurement by looking at it in terms of four dimensions below.

Consequential

First, your measurements need to be substantive enough that they are demonstrating a real pain point, opportunity, or game-changing leap forward. I call this dimension consequential, because whether it demonstrates something positive or negative, it isn’t just a metric that sounds good or bad. Its measurement has an impact on the business in one way or another.

According to a Smarter CX Insights report in 2018, 57% of CX professionals say they are unsure of what measurements are needed in order to indicate their customer experience is improving. To me, this means that nearly 6 in 10 customer experience professionals aren’t clear what the consequential numbers are in their business. This is a huge problem, and it underscores some of the challenges I often hear, where companies say the customer comes first, yet fail to back that up with investments.

If there is a disconnect between the CX practitioners whose intentions are good yet are unsure how to measure their success, and the executives whose resources are stretched so thin that they require the utmost justification for every dollar spent and hour labored, then it’s no wonder why customer experience is something that is often talked about but not acted upon like it should be.

Understandable

With real-time insights peppering us with data points, surveys, website metrics, email statistics, CSAT scores, financial results, and with sometimes hundreds of other measurements at our disposal, it is easy to get overwhelmed. What’s more, some organizations have their own methods of calculating success metrics, whether those are sales numbers, customer loyalty numbers, or any other number of critical business KPIs.

Having customized calculations of your metrics can make sense for highly specialized businesses, but it is critical that those measurements are understandable by those responsible for interpreting and understanding them. Put another way, if you want to demonstrate either your success in customer experience initiatives, or your need for more investment of resources in order to improve them, you need to provide your measurements in a way that is easy to make sense of by someone who isn’t necessarily a CX expert.

Creating and using more understandable measurements will have the added benefit of opening up the dialogue between teams so that they can more meaningfully contribute to discussions and initiatives to improve those numbers.  While I’ve been a bit harsh on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) at times in this book, this is actually an area where a universal, easy-to-calculate measurement can be incredibly helpful.

Actionable

You can have the best ideas or most compelling argument for why something should happen to improve your brand’s customer experience, but if you don’t make your case in a way that is actionable, you’re simply going to have frustrated customers—and employees.

That same Smarter CX Insights report I referenced earlier also found that less than one-third of customer experience professionals stated they had access to the information they need to truly improve their customers’ experience[ii].  Make sure to provide measurements and data to the teams that will help them take actions. Sometimes this requires diving in deep with your teams to understand what they need to do their jobs and fulfill the type of customer experience you want them to enable.

Repeatable

While there might be a use case where this doesn’t apply, it is rare. One of the hallmarks of a meaningful measurement is its ability to provide a baseline to use as a comparison to illustrate growth in performance (or a decrease in performance, as the case may be) over time.

If you can’t recreate the measurements you are taking, whether because it is too difficult, the systems in place don’t allow repeat measurements, or some other reason, then their value will be dubious over time.

This is something that was drilled home for me as I worked on my Lean Six Sigma black belt certification, which relied heavily on statistics and well-defined tests in order to measure progress on reducing defects, waste, and other improvements. Even if your organization doesn’t subscribe to Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, or any of the other processes or methodologies created to improve company performance, it is still important that you are able to recreate the tests you perform. Otherwise, how will you know if you are succeeding or failing?

“Meaningful” is in the eye of the beholder

I wish it were as simple as providing you with something like five metrics that work for every single business that could serve as meaningful measurements, but unfortunately, you will need to determine for yourself which ones best suit your needs.

While every organization is different, if you use the four dimensions described earlier in this article you should be able to find the meaningful measurements for customer experience in your organization. Best of luck in your CX measurement initiatives and may you find meaningful success!

[i] Dictionary.com. “Meaningful.” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/meaningful

[ii] Perry, Beth. “The CX Snapshot – October 2021.” Oracle Blogs. https://smartercx.com/straight-cx-leaders-latest-insights-2018/

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