Measuring Customer Experience

Human behavior and technology is evolving together, but are businesses struggling to ‘keep pace’ with the change? According to a research done by Zendesk (a customer service software company), 87% of customers feel that brands need to put in more effort into providing seamless experience. The new generation of customer is present Omni-channel, empowered, demanding and submerged into a digital ecosystem.

Why digital customer experience?

As people – customers, consumers, prospects – use ever more digital channels and devices in their interactions with brands and organizations, the need for tracking/mapping/measuring digital customer experience rises. “50 % of consumer product investments will be redirected to customer experience innovations by 2017.” (Gartner)

Almost every organization is putting customer experience (CX) at its core strategy. According to recent research by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (HBR-AS), approximately 50% of surveyed business leaders say CX is a top-two differentiator for their business but only 50% of them perform well in it.

Some Success story using Customer Experience Analytics tools

American Eagle –

  • 1. Saw a 20% increase in mobile traffic once they identified experience in that channel
  • 2. Improved customer satisfaction by correcting some errors which customers pointed out

Virgin Atlantic –

  • 1. Recorded a 10% rise in the number of visitors searching for flights on their website
    7% increase in average booking value and
  • 2. An improved ability to detect and correct issues

Octagon Insurance –

  • 1. Saw a 22% increase in conversion rates
  • 2. 40% reduction in validation errors
  • 3. 330% increase in overall ROI

But is it all very ‘hunky-dory’ with CX?

While most organizations have specific goals/investment to support sales or customer relations, they do not spend a lot of time digging in to what the customer really goes through when evaluating products. Along with CX another area where organizations need to focus on is the use of ‘big-data’. According to a recent McKinsey report, organizations are capturing only a fraction of the potential value available from big data and analytics.

Some specific problems identified are –

At the analytics level

  • 1.Research shows that organizations collect a lot of data on their customers but the real obstacle is to look at the data, share the data, and analyze the data to make it more workable
  • 2.Enhancing CX is the end game but to reach to that the main problem is to find the right data, from multiple channels
  • 3.Analytical tools are fragmented

From the organizations point of view

HBR – AS found that fewer than a quarter of companies integrate customer data across channels to provide a single customer view

Organizations are silo-ed – corporate culture to move from being ‘functional’ to improving customer experiences

To Solve the Problem – Tools for digital customer experience

Tracking customer activities across multiple touch points is challenging as it involves collecting and organizing vast amounts of data that is usually kept in silos. Further, the data comes from different channels (e.g., voice, web, mobile) and in different formats (e.g., audio, chat). It can be structured (e.g., IVR menu) or unstructured (e.g., comments on social media). There are a number of tools in the market that map the customer journey through various touch points to give a holistic view of customer experience across multiple channels.

Tools help in many ways. They help to integrate data and gives a holistic view and helps to reach the right data. However, companies need to supplement this by understanding the voice of consumer coming from social channels and other offline feedback mechanisms. Listening to the consumer voice on social channels gives important pointers towards their behavior, interests and attitudes which can help companies in devising targeted messages for a target segment.

They help to visualize experience through the eyes of the customer
They help in quantifying experience and help to identify patterns in trends with customer segments

There are many integrated customer experience measurement tools in the market currently, some of them highlighted below –

Zendesk – Offers multiple channel integration, customization options as well as reporting

IBM Tealeaf – Helps to monitor large traffic in mobile sites or apps, and offers a highly customized metric capabilities

Satmetrix – Offers surveys with advanced capabilities, like segmenting by location, industry or product. For enterprise clients, Satmetrix provides private virtual cloud with enhanced support

ResponseTek – Works as an early warning system, and helps organizations to track not only website data but also social media.

ClickTale – Provides heatmaps and visitors’ session recordings which helps to visualize customer behavior. It can track your website on desktop, tablet and mobile. It is also integrated with Google Analytics (GA)

Adobe Experience Manager – It not only helps to build content but it also helps to build assets for web. Mobile and social media channels

Finally, customer journey/experience mapping is important and should be done with the intention of finding out small problems which could be ‘big’ issues in the future. Mapping journey helps organizations to get ‘closer’ to their customers. Hence selection of the ‘right tool’ that suits your business needs is critical.

Canary signal management approach was born out of a burning desire to help simplify and enhance the value the healthcare industry gets out of the digital data explosion.