Design Your Customer Experience Metric

Companies interested in loyalty often measure Net Promoter®; likewise companies interested in Customer Satisfaction measure CSAT, so it seems logical to ask with the current buzz around Customer Experience how should you measure the CE? This is an important question for without an adequate measure you risk not doing Customer Experience at all! After all if you don’t measure it, how can you know if you are genuinely creating value from your experience?

To design a CE metric, you must first start with a valid definition of Customer Experience. This is shown in figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Beyond Philosophy Definition of Customer Experience

Notice how this definition requires consideration of the whole journey a customer has with your organisation: a journey that includes the rational and emotional response to that journey as well as its subconscious and conscious components.

If you can include all these elements then you can craft your metric.
Of course you as a business want to get something out of the exercise of measuring CE such as improvements in CSAT, Net Promoter®, Spend, Tenure, Preference or any other metric/ KPI of importance to you. This is why it is not enough just to measure the components of the Customer Experience; you also have to conduct root cause analysis to understand which components give the biggest bang for the buck. And by components we mean not just touchpoints but also emotions.

In this way you can build up a CE Metric comprising key emotions and touchpoints that can then be tracked, used to focus any investments and used as a means to incentivise performance. For instance with one client we developed a measure that include 3 emotions and 5 key touchpoints (some of which were subconscious), this then comprised their CE Index measure.