Measuring customer experience
Customer experience is what you’d say about a company or brand anecdotally at a dinner party. It’s tied in heavily with your emotional state towards a brand at a given point in time.
It is fundamentally hard to measure, because it has been traditionally difficult to capture good quality and reliable data. Customer satisfaction surveys, if done periodically only touch a moment in time, and get low response rates. More recently web based event driven customer satisfaction surveys have been proliferating, and these produce more interesting data, but the sheer quantity threatens to overwhelm customers.
Of course the most useful feedback comes from verbatim comments, not multiple choice selections and these are difficult to analyze, though significant progress is being made in this area by some vendors.
This difficult of getting good quality experience data is why we rely on handling complaints from customers reactively, even though it is well documented that only a tiny proportion of customers complain. The latest figures I’ve seen suggest that as few as 1 in 100 dissatisfied customers actually complain.
For example, I stayed last year at the New Yorker hotel in Midtown Manhattan. I had an appalling experience - I woke with more than 50 bed bug bites. I didn’t complain, but I did write a slamming review on Expedia.com (as have quite a few others).
It felt great – even like revenge! The fact that I put the name of the hotel in this blog means that it will be picked up by search engines and prospective visitors will be able to view what I thought about my experience.
This is one example how the online channel fundamentally changes the way that we can now measure (and therefore potentially act upon) individual customer experiences, since customers now have a voice in the blogosphere, and this data can be captured and analysed.
If your business is to provide a service over the internet, however, then you have a richness of experience data not found in other channels. Businesses such as Expedia, online banking operations, online retailers or Software as a Service (SaaS) providers can precisely track the experience of customers, and measure how effective their service is.
Measuring it enables you to prioritize resources, fix problems and to identify which customers were affected.
Measuring it is one thing, acting upon it is another, since you effectively have to track experience at an individual level, and be able to act in real time – after all there’s no point in trying to take remedial action days or weeks after your customer experiences a negative or positive event.
When thinking about acting on negative customer experiences, there are two distinct phases: acting while they are still on the site itself (e.g. reshaping network traffic, or changing a business process), and acting once they have departed (e.g. sending an email or opening a case in a CRM system). Both of these types of actions must be automated in some fashion in order that the action can become a repeatable and robust process.
In many cases customer value is a critical component here. The kind of action that you take is very much affected by both the value of the customer, and well as the actual process involved when a negative experience was encountered. For example, a high value customer experiences a ‘page not found’ error in the middle of applying for an online savings account. Clearly the action you’re going to take is probably phone based, whereas your reaction to an unusually slow response from an obscure and rarely visited part of the site is going to be different.
