What are your customer experience success metrics? And how do they differ from your VoC metrics?
Last Tuesday, we celebrated the second annual CX Day, a day to celebrate both customers and the professionals who work tirelessly to improve the customer experience.
I hosted two Google Hangouts for CX Day, the first of which I blogged about last week. In today’s post, I share the second Hangout, with content equally as insightful as the first.
Panelists for this Hangout included Erich Dietz (VP of Business Development, InMoment), Tabitha Dunn (Group Director, Customer Insights, Citrix), and Lynn Hunsaker (Head of Customer Experience Optimization, ClearAction). Unfortunately, we lost Lynn early on due to technical issues, but Erich and Tabitha did a great job of discussing the topic at hand: Metrics to Map Your Customer Experience Success. A little background on the topic, from the CX Day site:
Ability to drive executive support and engagement in customer experience metrics and results can be challenging. It requires thoughtful selection and testing of leading and lagging indicators, and translation of data into clear communication of results, progress, and actions. In this Hangout we’ll discuss how to approach customer experience metrics in a manner similar to other business problems: find root causes, create full solutions, test, and learn.
The format of the discussion was again to cover some “starter” topics for those who are early in the stages of their customer experience journey and needed some basic “how-tos” to get started, followed by some more advanced questions for those who are well underway and might want to energize their current efforts. The questions I posed were:
Starting Out in CX Progress Metrics
What’s the difference between voice-of-the-customer metrics and measuring your organization’s impact on VoC?
What kinds of metrics are typical for each?
How can a manager get started in identifying meaningful metrics to manage CX progress?
How can you test different metrics and survey questions to find the right ones for your industry and customers?
Energizing Your CX Progress Metrics
How can it make a difference to have a plan-to-act before asking customers a question?
How can you get your stakeholders involved in identifying and acting on the root cause of CX issues?
What are some ways to pull together other metrics besides customer effort, VoC, and retention to build the full picture of CX progress?
What are some ways to tie financial results to CX metrics and CX management metrics?
While the Hangout lasted 30 minutes, we probably could’ve talked for at least another 30 minutes. Erich and Tabitha were able to answer most of the questions before we ran out of time.
I think this is an important discussion, i.e., understanding the difference between VoC metrics and success metrics – and identifying those that are right for your business. The importance of tying VoC metrics to business outcomes cannot be expressed strongly enough, which likely means your success metrics will be a result of that linkage.
Measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not so. -Galileo
