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The Gist
- Metrics matter. Customer experience metrics are essential for CMOs to make informed CX investments.
- Measure Wisely. Customer experience measurement should connect customer behaviors to feelings.
- Strategic steps. Identifying pivotal moments and assigning relevant metrics lead to impactful CX.
CMOs want to make CX investments that will drive the most growth and loyalty, but they often lack the right customer experience metrics to make these decisions. Often, CMOs rely on using a single measurement methodology or a “beacon metric” such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), in addition to operational metrics that focus on pain point detection.
A CX measurement strategy should help the organization to connect the dots between business-driving customer behaviors, such as renewal of contracts and repeat purchases, and how customers feel. There are three steps that CMOs can take in order to become more successful in delivering customer experiences that add value for both the customer and the organization.
Related Article: 20 Customer Experience Metrics Critical for Your Business
Customer Experience Metrics Strategy
Step 1: Identify Pivotal Moments Across Your Customer Journeys
Pivotal moments in the customer journey are those that have a disproportionate impact on a customer’s perception of their experience and your brand. They are the touchpoints along the customer journey where brands have the best opportunity to strengthen customer relationships.
To identify these high-impact pivotal moments, CMOs and their teams should evaluate the end-to-end journey of key customer personas to identify the touchpoints where their brand has the opportunity to amplify both CX and brand results. Meaning that brands shouldn’t just focus on the buying journey, but also the stages when customers own and advocate for your brand.
For example, a retailer might identify a pivotal moment that exists across each stage in customers’ journeys:
The Buying Process
Customers are evaluating their choices between a number of its products on the webpage. From user research, the retailer could tell that customers were spending time looking at products but ultimately not making purchases. When customers did make purchases, they were from product referrals.
Product Ownership
The retailer learned from listening to feedback from customer communities that many of its customers are very competitive and performance-driven. They purchased the product to achieve a specific goal and were tracking those goals manually. One of the most commonly asked questions to customer service and to the website from those customers was to create a way for customers to track their progress and get advice on goal setting from experts.
Customer Advocacy
The retailer discovered that the customers with the most frequent and longest purchase history were from recommendations from special interest communities, influencers and friends.
Marketers must validate these touchpoints with voice of the customer and quantitative journey metrics research to identify pivotal moments from the customers’ perspective. Then, they should green-light these touchpoints as candidates for potential CX enhancement initiatives.
Related Article: Customer Experience Metrics That Matter to This CX Leader
Step 2: Use the High-Value Experience Framework to Identify Where to Focus Efforts and Resources
Next, you should evaluate which experiences are most likely to create mutual value for customers and the business. There are three levels of customer value — catalytic, personal and functional — that drive commercially productive customer behaviors such as paying a premium or referring other customers to the brand.
In this framework, functional value is about the product. Personal value is about supporting a customer’s choice. Catalytic value is about shaping a customer’s journey to a goal so that they have a greater understanding of their own needs and are confident in taking a new direction. CMOs and their teams are most successful when they craft their customer engagement strategy around the delivery of each of these levels of value.
Marketers should prioritize the experiences that your organization provides for customers based on the functional, personal and catalytic values that they deliver. They should use the following prompts to help diagnose an aspirational yet attainable experience:
- Are we currently equipped to deliver on those experiences as promised?
- Is there an opportunity to amplify existing experiences that are well-received by our customers?
- Would this experience create a competitive advantage within our industry category if pursued?
- Does the experience require a completely new workflow or skill?
- Is this experience measurable?
- Does our organization have the opportunity to deliver a “new to category” experience that is progressive and rethinks what exists in our space?
Building off of the theoretical retailer example, let’s say that the retailer is focusing on a pivotal moment in the product ownership stage, such as customer onboarding. The marketing team identifies that the most impactful, yet realistic, opportunity that they have to deliver a high-value experience is to support customers’ sense of agency. Not just helping the customer reach a specific objective, but in a way that is efficient and not too time intensive. The marketing team then aligns on 1-2 experiences that they can test, but also measure. For example, based on goals included in their customer profiles, they could recommend a series of critical onboarding steps that customers can self-schedule on their calendar and show progress and next-step recommendations once each action is complete.
Once the team has a sense of what experiences they should test, the next step involves assigning metrics that exemplify desired customer actions or behaviors that are directly linked to stakeholder roles and objectives.
Step 3: Use the Hierarchy of CX Metrics to Assign the Most Relevant, Diagnostic Measures
In order to gain alignment and action on CX initiatives, you must connect the dots between existing measures of customer loyalty and satisfaction, such as NPS, and the metrics your stakeholders will find the most appropriate or actionable for their level of responsibility. The below framework illustrates the relationships between low-level operational metrics and higher-level KPIs presented to executives. Think of metrics in Levels 3 and 4 like a trail of breadcrumbs. For example, metrics aligned to tactical levers and optimization help you to define what yu did to earn customer love and loyalty.
Figure 1. Gartner’s Hierarchy of CX Metrics
Identify and select the operational or tactical measures at the lower levels of the hierarchy (Levels 3 and 4). Specifically, these are the ones that align with the responsibilities and performance indicators for roles responsible for executing the commercially valuable experience defined in Step 2.
Revisiting the retailer example, in order to evaluate the success of their recommended actions during customer onboarding described above, example metrics could include:
- Task completion and number of milestones achieved by customers.
Related Article: Top Customer Experience Metrics That Impact Internal Operations
Number of Customer Case Studies Based on Milestones Achieved Using Recommendations
Having identified the low-level metrics associated with your ideas for pivotal moments, the long term goal is to understand how these metrics are correlated and drive the desired business and customer outcomes (Level 1 and 2 in the hierarchy). Across time, evaluate the performance of your high-value experience projects against the changes in Level 2 measures (e.g., NPS and CSAT) and ultimately business outcomes identified in Level 1 of the hierarchy.
This is done by comparing those customers who are at the highest levels of satisfaction with increased activity in diagnostic outcomes identified. It will show the link between the organization’s happiest customers and the desired actions that they are more likely to take as a result of the high-value experiences delivered.
As you share results, where possible, add in customer feedback and verbatims related to the experience to build a human connection with, and bring stakeholders closer to, the customer.
Doing this will enable you to build a stronger narrative around the return on experience. It will show the link between your happiest customers and the desired actions that they are more likely to take as a result of the high-value experiences delivered.
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