Customer Experience Podcast

Are You Using the Right Measures?

Measuring your progress for your Customer Experience strategy is an essential aspect to your program’s success. Not only will it show if your program is working to provide an excellent experience for your customers, but it also shows what customers really value, which can be an elusive thing to discover.

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, we discuss the importance of measuring Customer Experience correctly. We invited Don Peppers, bestselling author, business strategist, and engaging keynote speaker to joins us to share his wisdom on the subject. With 11 books on marketing and Customer Experience, he had much to add to our discussion about the best way to handle Customer Experience measurement.

There are two types data marketers can user for measurement:

1. Voice of Customer (VOC) data, which involves an interaction with customers.
2. Observational data, which involves analyzing numbers and operational reports, among other things.

Peppers says that VOC data is excellent for many things. It can provide you feedback on moments in your experience that are or are not working. It also gives you the opportunity to respond to problems immediately and repair damage to a relationship before it has repercussions on customer behavior. However, it has some drawbacks for Customer Experience measurement.

Let me give you an example. I fly on Delta a lot. Every time I fly back and forth to England, they send me a survey. They want to know more about my experience on the flight. However, I never fill out the survey unless I had either a very good or very poor flight.

This survey is an example of why VOC data measurement is flawed. Since I don’t fill out the survey every time, they have a skewed view of how I feel about their airline. Sometimes I am delighted; other times I am disgusted.

Now, if Delta were to look at my flight purchases over the past six months, that would be observational data. If they were to see that I purchased fewer flights compared to the previous year, they would see that my customer behavior had changed. Then, they would know how their Customer Experience is performing and they could react.

To be fair, both types of measures are useful and have their place in Customer Experience Measurement. However, in many ways, marketers tend to favor VOC measurement over observational measurement. The reasons for this preference are understandable; VOC is easier and more popular, and who knows better than the customer how they felt about the experience, right?

However, it is in the observational data that you get a much clearer understanding of how your Customer Experience performs. Observational data shows customer behavior, and that is a far more accurate indicator of how customers feel about your experience.

Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about Are You Using the Right Measures for your Customer Experience.

The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior.  

If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.  

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