Measuring customer experience (CX) can be murky and filled with anecdotal, qualitative information. However, measuring the effectiveness of a CX strategy can be very straightforward. It involves setting goals and performing a quantitative analysis of the results.
So where do you start?
The way we measure CX strategy is through key performance indicators (KPIs). Connecting CX strategies to business outcomes in today’s world is often the responsibility of a digital product owner, an enterprise architect, or (if the position exists) a director of customer experience. The approach taken to CX strategy and KPIs can be heavily influenced by the primary function of the person that “owns” the CX strategy, but it should be as comprehensive and enterprise-oriented as possible.
In the case of CX, your KPIs will depend heavily on your organization’s primary value discipline(s). Let’s take a look at three the classic value disciplines through the lens of the customer experience.
CX strategy pairs a value discipline, e.g., product leadership with appropriate KPIs.
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Customer Intimacy
Truly customer-oriented organizations gravitate towards this value discipline. As a goal, you may want to create the ideal experience at every point along each customer journey that is conceivably possible. This requires aligning people, processes and technologies around the customer. From a technology perspective, this includes achieving deep personalization through the use of integration and smart content.
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Product Leadership
Product leadership is all about accurately predicting and responding to the customer’s demands. It requires a deep knowledge and understanding of your customers, so you can develop insights into their wants and their needs and thus deliver the products and services they want and need. On the technology side, this means being able to sense and accurately identify your customers across every channel with which they choose to engage your organization. This requires a mature digital experience software stack.
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Operational Excellence
Finally, operational excellence is all about how well you can control your costs, which come down to improving operational efficiency. Cloud-native infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service have all helped eliminate or at least reduce the capital and operating expenses related to providing and measuring the customer experience. With your infrastructure and applications in the cloud, you can significantly, and with reasonable ease, implement your CX strategy with the efficiencies and reduced operating expense that lead to greater success for your organization.
Take Aways
No single KPI defines total CX strategy success. From this starting point, you will eventually be able to identify relationships with other business metrics, like earnings and customer lifetime value (CLV). In order to move the needle positively toward your CX strategy, the first step (after defining the strategy) is to define clear KPIs that provide your brand and your business a comprehensive roadmap to follow.
For a more detailed look at value disciplines and guidelines to creating that roadmap, including CCM-specific CX metrics, get your FREE copy of the CX Strategy and KPIs eBook from Topdown today!
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