Customer Experience (CX) is broadly defined as a customer’s overall perception of a company or brand based on all their interactions with it. This spans every step of the journey, such as visiting a website or store, interacting with customer service, using a product or service, or receiving follow-ups, emails, or support.
For example, if you quickly find what you need on a website, get helpful support when you have a problem, or receive your product on time, you’d likely say that the company provides good CX. However, if any of those things go poorly, you’d probably say that you had a bad CX.
This simple example highlights the core challenge of CX. CX – good or bad – is based on the perception of the customer. While companies do not control the customer perception, they can influence it through the experiences they design and deliver.
Business leaders know CX matters. But many businesses struggle to connect CX to employee behaviors, business decisions, budgets, and organizational priorities.
It’s not that these organizations aren’t collecting customer experience metrics. They are measuring customer reactions rather than intentionally designing the experience. More importantly, they are not linking those experiences to business results.
Are you focused on the effect rather than the cause?
Many organizations treat CX as a “soft” discipline and rely heavily on perception-based metrics. For example, surveys and measures like NPS and CSAT focus only the perception of the customer post-interaction. This reactive approach provides limited insight into business results, resulting in CX being viewed separately from business performance. This makes it difficult for business leaders to justify CX investments because they cannot connect investments to business outcomes.
Having said that, CX is a key differentiator as products and services become more similar and commoditized. Poor CX can (and will) drive customers away – even if the product itself is good.
In the face of “doing something rather than nothing”, business leaders often invest in “last mile” customer-facing capabilities in reaction to poor CX scores. Organizations invest in digital capabilities like mobile apps, AI chatbots, and self-service portals as they perceive that customers prefer these channels for interaction. They invest training and coaching programs within the contact centers to teach skills like structured problem-solving or empathy. Or they invest in workforce management tools and flexible staffing models to better forecast and meet anticipated customer demand.
And while these investments may influence the customer perception in the moment, they still do not directly translate to business results. In fact, they often mask the real issues – poor system design, poor understanding of the customer journey, and a poor understanding of the underpinning foundation that enables good CX.
Where good CX actually starts
Good CX does not start at the digital channel or the interaction with a contact center. Not taking these steps in order results in the service and support provided at the last mile appearing to be an afterthought.
Good CX results from the following three steps:
First, understand the real-world issue customers are encountering through journey design. Journey design focuses on the human experience, mapping out the steps a customer takes to achieve a goal, uncovering their emotions, points of friction, and needs along the way.
The next step is to engineer a scalable user-friendly way for the customer to accomplish their goals and eliminate those points of friction. This is done via product and solution design. To be clear, product design focused on building a specific repeatable vehicle isn’t enough; the end-to-end infrastructure, software, and processes needed to deliver a solution must also be developed. (Design thinking is a good approach for product and solution design.)
The last step in enabling good CX is the intentional design of service and support. Intentionally designing the operational workflows, contact center procedures, knowledge bases, and contact channels to help customers before the customer needs help ensures that resolution to issues feel seamless and matches the experience designed during journey mapping.
Following these three steps shifts the focus from reacting to the feedback of the day to proactively developing and delivering the CX the organization wants. Now CX becomes measurable in a way that is relevant and meaningful to the business.
A framework for measuring CX
When it comes to measuring CX, most organizations focus on the effect, rather than the cause. This focus on the effect often results in organizations investing in things that may not move the needle when it comes to realizing business outcomes from CX.
Building on the foundation of journey design, followed by product and solution design, and finally to purposeful design of service and support, organizations can focus on identifying and implementing CX measures that are relevant to organizational strategy and business results. Drawing on established performance management principles, a simple cause-effect-business outcome CX framework (similar to service value streams) can be used to measure and evaluate CX.
- Cause – “Cause” represents behaviors that are within the control of the organization. The cause consists of employee behaviors and operational activities that shape the customer experience. Employees that follow through on commitments, demonstrate ownership, and solve issues quickly shape a positive customer experience.
- Effect – The effect represents what customers experience and perceive. This is where the traditional measures like NPS, CSAT, and survey responses belong, and reflect if the intended experience is being delivered.
- Business Outcome – Business outcomes illustrate whether the customer experience is delivering business value. Business results and value are typically depicted in an organization’s goals and objectives, and represent targets like revenue growth, customer retention, reduced customer churn, and lower service costs. When measures connect cause to effect to business outcomes, CX evolves from being just a customer service initiative to a business discipline.
This is not to say that perception measures like NPS and survey feedback are no longer needed or useful – they are. But too many organizations consider perception metrics to be the goal, which it is not. Perception metrics help the organization understand if the customer is realizing the intended outcomes of product and service design.
Secondly, the strongest causes are both observable and measurable. It’s one thing to say that an organization demonstrates customer focus; it’s another thing to measure that customer focus in terms of response time, resolution quality, and commitment completion rates.
Lastly, keep in mind that not every behavior influences every business outcome. Organizations must first identify the causes that have both the greatest impact on customer experience and on business results.
Making CX Measurable and Meaningful
Making CX measurable and meaningful starts with shifting focus from what customers say to what drives their experience – and how that connects to business outcomes. Ask these three questions:
- What customer behaviors or employee actions are we measuring as causes?
- What customer perceptions are we measuring as effects?
- What business outcomes are we expecting those experiences to produce?
If you can measure the effect but not identify the cause or connect it to a business result, your CX measurement framework is incomplete.
Share