Customer Experience Truth #6 – Return On Customer Experience Initiatives Are Often Difficult To Measure, But Not Impossible

Photo credit: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com

ROI. R.O.I. roi.

One of the most challenging aspects of Customer Experience is that the field does not fall under a specific silo, making it even more challenging to tie a piece of the revenue pie to the overall effort. Try this activity for selecting the right set of metrics for your business.

Understand Why.

The most important thing to do when you start measuring an initiative is to clearly understand why the initiative exists in the first place. This information will help in shaping the way you measure and report. Is your company focusing on Customer Experience now because you are seeing increased attrition? Perhaps you are trying to understand loyalty? Or, are you trying to make a case for your customer?

Depending on the reason (or prioritization of reasons), you will have a clearer view of the bigger “Goals” you want to attain through your Customer Experience initiatives. Each of these goals will then evolve into a specific metric.

Build Path Models.

Build a path model for each of the goals you want to attain. There are two key benefits to building path models for each of the metrics you want to use to track Customer Experience impact:

1. You are able to clearly see which functions are benefiting from activities.
2. You can further vet out which metrics are more impactful over others.

For instance, below we are looking at “Increased Revenue”. More specifically, this example ties back to a specific feature within a product.

In this example, the following functions are highlighted:

• Email Marketing: Delivery of campaign that drives self-service and decrease of inbound calls
• Support: Decrease of high-cost support methods
• Product Management: Obtain a clearer view over time of product features that drive revenue and satisfaction
• Overall: Increased Revenue

Integrate Quantitative with Qualitative Data.

After you’ve built path models for your list of metrics, take a look at how you can integrate qualitative data into your path models. From the example above, we can add “Increased Survey Satisfaction Scores”:

By integrating qualitative data into your path models, you are doing two things:

1. Fostering an environment that always includes “asking the customer” as a validation point, and
2. Showing stakeholders which specific quantitative metrics impact specific qualitative metrics.

Now, you’re ready to present a list of potential metrics to track Customer Experience improvement over time.

Make It A Team Effort.

This last piece is perhaps the single most important piece of being able to track ROI of Customer Experience Initiatives effectively. When you are selecting how to measure return, make sure that stakeholders from each function are able to have a seat at the table. Everyone needs to agree that this set of metrics is what will be used to measure return.

If you skip this step, then regardless of how fantastic your numbers look, the company may not agree that you’ve seen true return from Customer Experience.

Next, we’ll discuss Customer Experience Truth #7 – Bringing The Brand And Brand Promise To Life Is A Big Piece Of Customer Experience