Decoding the Customer

Customer Experience is more than a buzz word these days. Organizations the world over have realized that putting the customer at the center of their business is a winning strategy. Most businesses face the challenge of getting everyone on board with customer-centric thinking, even when there is buy-in from some members of the leadership team.

It is often at this crucial juncture, when I get the call or email asking about my availability to assist as a customer experience keynote speaker. Sometimes teams need to get fired up about a new strategic shift towards customer experience. Other times they need that “ah-ha” moment to realize that everyone (and I mean everyone) in their organization contributes to customer experience. Or perhaps a team would benefit from some inspiring CX case studies to help them think about things differently. No matter the task at hand, I’m here to help organizations jump-start or breathe new life into their customer experience efforts.

As a CX practitioner, I leverage 20 years of experience helping organizations realize business value through CX strategy. My experience isn’t hypothetical. It’s real. When I speak with teams, I draw on my breadth of firsthand experience driving customer-centric change, incorporating practical tips and tool, as well examples of CX best practices.

If you’ve heard my podcast, you’ll know that I’m no stranger to the microphone. I also did a bit of theater in my younger years, so the jump to the stage as a customer experience keynote speaker – where I get to share my professional passion of customer experience – was an easy transition.

I really enjoy the energy and buzz speaking to large groups at industry conferences and annual corporate events. But I am just as comfortable engaging with smaller groups. Smaller-format sessions can provide a great opportunity for leadership engagement, where I can tap into my extensive experience facilitating executive CX strategy workshops and incorporating design thinking approaches.  

Each one of my keynote addresses or team workshops is unique. I tailor these sessions based on the format, audience, industry and objectives. I am happy to develop customized case studies, audience engagement, interactive group activities, or whatever is required to spark meaningful change.

I often get questions from leaders about my availability and approach as a customer experience keynote speaker. Here are answers to some of the most common questions.

Do you do in-person or virtual events? I am happy to do either. Let’s chat about what would be best for your event.

Are you able to travel overseas speaking engagements? Yes, I love travel and consider myself a bit of a cultural chameleon! I speak 3 languages and have lived on 5 continents.

What are your speaker fees? This varies by speaking engagement and is mostly driven by the amount of preparation time required.

Can you incorporate case studies that are applicable to our industry? Certainly. I am happy to research and develop examples that will resonate with your audience.

Do you have a headshot and professional bio for our event marketing materials? Of course! I have these on hand and am happy to send them to you.

Can you help us raise awareness about our event through your channels? I would be happy to. Please let me know if you have any specific requests, and I will help as much as I can.

The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including VOC research and customer insight) or get in touch via email. 

The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX measurement, insights, leadership alignment and CX change implementation) or get in touch via email. 

The podcast is currently on hiatus and will be back with new content later this year. In the meantime, I’ve curated a highlight reel of my favorite past shows to share with listeners.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, leadership alignment and CX business case assessments) or get in touch via email. 

Jeanne Bliss has always been an important figure in the CX industry. She is truly a pioneer in this field and has spent 35 years transforming companies, where she’s led organizations to earn 98% customer loyalty rates. Jeanne Bliss helps companies and people become the best version of themselves. She guides them to define, build and live the behaviors and actions that will fuse customers to them, and ultimately create deep and memorable relationships. Creating these deeper bonds has been Jeanne’s singular mission for over 35 years. First, as the inaugural Chief Customer Officer at Lands’ End, Coldwell Banker, Allstate and Microsoft Corporations. Then since 2002, guiding over 20,000 leaders around the world to understand that improving lives should be their most important strategic vision. She has shepherded a whole new breed of leader into the marketplace prepared to lead this change through her pioneering years as a practitioner, experience coaching global leaders, her four game-changing books, and as co-founder of the Customer Experience Professional’s association. If the proof is in the pudding, then there is certainly no doubt why Jeanne is one of the most prominent and respected thought leaders in the world of customer experience.

Jeanne Bliss, CCXP, CEO of Customerbliss

If you’d like to learn more about Jeanne’s work, be sure to follow her on LinkedIn, where she often shares insights about customer experience and more. Her blog is second to none as a resource for aspiring CX professionals. Her books provide foundational knowledge about customer experience, and her podcast, The Human Duct Tape Show, is well worth a listen!

Jeanne’s father set the tone for her career in customer experience. As the owner of a local she store, he became not just a part of the community, but a part of people’s lives. Putting shoes on children’s feet and welcoming families into his store as though they were part of his family. When he retired, there was a line of customers 3 blocks long, waiting to thank him and wish him well. Customer experience was in Jeanne’s bones and it encouraged her to ask questions about how brands can create those special experiences that fuse customers to them.

What’s your three blocks long? How will you be remembered? And that’s really so much of what’s missing for me as we get into customer experience. – Jeanne Bliss

After acquiring degrees in marketing and apparel design, and working in the retail industry for several years, Jeanne’s role at Lands’ End really catapulted her into her career in customer experience. At Lands’ End she worked closely with the CEO Gary Comber, whose enthusiastic support for focusing on the customer enabled Jeanne to learn, experiment and implement concepts that would become the core foundation of her “CX kit bag”. Jeanne went on to lead customer experience efforts at organizations across a diverse array of industries. Each one presented unique challenges and opportunities, but she identified her gift for being the “glue” that unites teams around an end state. 

Jeanne recommends that those who aspire to a CX leadership role first focus on how and where they can drive change at the ground level. She encourages CXers to get involved with operations, get their fingernails dirty and identify their unique gifts for improving customer’s lives.

She also highlights that it’s important to elevate the work and connect CX efforts to business outcomes. 

If you have a passion, it’s fantastic. But you need to be able to package the passion into simplicity, pragmatism and an understanding for leaders on why it’s important to do this work. – Jeanne Bliss

Jeanne highlights 3 things have have underpinned the longevity and success of CX or a heightened focus on customer experience. First, Jeanne points to “customer math”, or the acceptance by business leaders of customers as assets. This was accelerated during the economic downturns of the early and late ’00s, and it encouraged senior stakeholders to rethink their prioritization of customer experience given the benefit to the bottom line. 

The rise of social media has also impacted the focus on CX, by shifting the megaphone from companies (or their advertising agencies) to consumers. This has forced organizations to establish clarity around who they are and then fortify the reliability of their operating model to deliver.

When customers talk on social media, they really say three things: Did you do what you said you were going to do? Did you improve my life? And how did you make me feel? – Jeanne Bliss

Finally, the godmother of customer experience says leaders are starting to understand that business silos don’t unite themselves. This realization has given rise to the role of the Chief Customer Officer, but Jeanne warns that CX teams cannot become another silo, or it will defeat the purpose. She fears what could happen if CX professionals become too focused on the mechanics of CX and lose sight of the meaning of their work.

In her parting words, Jeanne suggests that a missing link has been getting leaders to align their own behavior and messaging to the vision of what they want their company’s brand to be. Covid has force fed the business world with an extra dose of humanity. CEOs are having frank conversations with employees and customers, thinking outside of the box and acting quickly to help improve the lives of their customers. These adaptations have become essential to brand survival, and the godmother of customer experience hopes these attributes will endure beyond the crisis to help elevate and solidify the work. 

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business define customer experience strategy that delivers results, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services or get in touch via email. To hear other episodes of Decoding the Customer, click here.

We’ve all seen it happen. Someone in IT, sales or operations makes a decision about a new product or a process with the best intentions, but the resulting change has a negative impact customer experience. When these things happen, it’s rarely out of malice. After all, no one (or at least we hope no one) goes around intentionally making customer experiences worse.

More often than not, the team that implemented the change just wasn’t thinking about the downstream impact on customer experience. This is bound to happen, because honestly, most businesses are geared to solve business problems. The customer may be the guiding light for CX departments and some executives, but historically that hasn’t been true for all teams. Additionally, the more removed a team is from the customer, the more difficult it can be to draw a connection between day to day responsibilities and customer outcomes.

In this scenario, a little assistance and structure are in order. And a customer impact scorecard is a great tool to for CX leaders to have in their toolbox.

A customer impact scorecard is a rating or evaluation tool that prompts the user to assess how something – be that a change to people, processes or technology – will eventually turn into customer outcomes and if these outcomes are desirable, neutral or adverse. The idea being that a scorecard becomes a quick and easy check and balance to avoid decisions which might inadvertently damage customer experience. It encourages stakeholders to pause and make an honest assessment of the impact on customer experience by moving the thinking from inside out to outside in.

Some organizations already have risk assessment scorecards in place for any business change or major investment, so why can’t the same assessment be done for customer experience? Surely customer experience is just as important to the long-term viability of any business. (And if you’d like to know a little bit more about helping your organization balance business risk and CX, then be sure to check out episode 36.)

It’s important to keep the customer impact scorecard simple and straightforward. The goal is to guide cross functional leaders to consider the customer before they make a business decision, but to avoid creating complex red tape that stakeholders end up resenting.

As shared with listeners at the start of the episode, I’ll be taking a hiatus from publishing new CX Mini Masterclasses for the next few months. The show will be back later in 2020. Keep an eye out for periodic re-broadcasts of favorites from the archive and possible new content from guest contributors.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

And, an added note to those who are already CCXPs, the Customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcasts listening towards certification renewal credits. So, be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 89, the third episode of June 2020. And my last CX Mini Masterclass episode, before I take a little hiatus to go on maternity leave.

Yes, my wonderful listeners, big changes are afoot, but I will be back. I have a very special interview episode with one of my CX heroes next week, so I’m very excited about that. After that episode, I’ll be taking a couple of months off from my weekly schedule of new episodes, but we’ll try to periodically repost a few past favorites from the archive and potentially some fresh content from a few of the show’s guest expert contributors before I’m back in the saddle later this year. I wanted to take us into this hiatus on a high note, so I’ve been saving one of my favorite topics for this episode.

Today, I’m going to share a simple, humble tool that I’ve found to be incredibly effective for driving customer-centric change, and that’s the Customer Impact Scorecard. At the time of recording this episode, the world is grappling with a global health crisis. Business operations are changing in real time, and there has never been a more important moment to keep tabs on how business decisions impact customer experience. So I’m going to share a simple tool that will help any team in your organization evaluate how changes to people, processes, or technology might impact customer experience.

If you are looking for a practical approach to help cross-functional teams stay the course towards shared customer experience goals, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I’ve seen this happen many times over.

Someone in IT, sales or operations makes a decision about a new product or a process with the best intentions, but the result has a negative impact on customer experience. Maybe it was a change to a policy that resulted in extra steps on the part of the customer, or a new platform that made it more difficult for teams to provide service support. Whatever the example, these things happen, and I find it’s rarely out of malice. After all, no one, or at least I hope no one, goes around intentionally making customer experiences worse.

More often than not, the issue is that the team that implemented the change just wasn’t thinking about the downstream impact on customer experience. Because let’s be honest, the customer may be the guiding light for CX teams and some executives, but historically, that hasn’t been true for all teams. Also, the more removed an employee or a department is from the customer, the more difficult it can be to draw the connection between someone’s day-to-day responsibilities and customer outcomes. In this scenario, a little assistance and structure are in order, and this is where the Customer Impact Scorecard can be your best friend.

A Customer Impact Scorecard is a rating or evaluation tool that prompts the user to assess something, be that a change to people, processes, or technology, that will eventually turn into customer outcomes, and if these outcomes are desirable, neutral, or adverse. The idea being that a scorecard becomes a quick and easy check and balance that helps prevent decisions which might inadvertently damage customer experience, or at least it pushes the stakeholders making these decisions to have an honest assessment of the impact on customer experience by moving the thinking from inside out to outside in. I’ve seen many organizations implement risk assessment scorecards for major business changes or investment spending, so why can’t the same assessment steps be done with customer experience in mind? Surely, customer experience is just as important to the long-term viability of any business.

And if you’d like to know a little bit more about how to help your organization balance business risk and customer experience, then be sure to check out episode 36. To get started building a customer impact scorecard, identify which attributes you’d like to score. Think about your customer promise, your principles, and what’s important to your customer. Turn these into thought starter questions that can be rated as positive, negative, or neutral impact.

Let’s say, for example, that respecting customers’ time is one of your customer experience principles. Then you might want to add, as one of your scorecard attributes, will this business change impact our ability to service customers in a timely manner and live up to our promise? Let’s say that ease of use is also something you know that is important to customers. Then you might want to add the question, will this change impact how easy it is for customers to do business with us?

I’d suggest building a scorecard with somewhere between five and 10 customer impact attributes aligned to your organization’s customer experience goals, customer promise, or principles. And then a simple three or five point rating scale from positive to negative, with the positive impact being a positive number, neutral being zero, and a negative impact being negative score. After evaluating a business change, the scorecard should yield a score that sheds light on the impact to customer experience. A high score would mean that an initiative is expected to have an overwhelmingly positive impact on customer experience.

And perhaps this positive result can be baked into the business case or prioritization. A score close to zero would indicate a neutral impact, so customer experience wouldn’t be a primary decision driver. And a negative score would indicate a business change with a potentially adverse impact on customer experience. If the score is negative, it should ring alarm bells and warrant closer evaluation.

Perhaps there’s an opportunity to adjust plans and mitigate this negative impact or at least consider the long-term effect on customer lifetime value versus the proposed benefit of the business change. If your leadership team loves scores, ratings, and structure, then this tool can add some real quantifiable muscle to the case for making decisions with the customer in mind, which is an important step to building customer centricity into your business. In terms of rolling out the scorecard tool, I suggest reaching out to your organization’s project management team or whoever the gatekeepers are for business change. Ask them what their process is for vetting new initiatives and if customer impact can be included in that process.

I think the key is to keep the scorecard stuff very straightforward and easy. You want to help guide cross-functional leaders to consider the customer before making a business decision, but you also want to avoid creating complex red tape that people end up presenting. If you’re looking for help ensuring that your organization makes business decisions that work towards best-in-class customer experience, not against it, then please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help.

You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast.

This helps others find the show. I’ll be back next week with a very special interview episode. I’ll see you then.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email.

Ben Motteram is the Founder and Principal of Melbourne-based CX consulting company, CXpert. With 25+ years of experience working with some of Australia’s most recognizable brands, he has helped many organisations to become more human in the way they deal with customers and employees. Ben assists clients in areas such as CX strategy, Voice of the Customer, and employee engagement. In December 2018, Ben was the only Australian named on a list of global thought leaders to follow on Twitter and his blog has been independently recognized for its insight on all things CX.

Ben Motteram

This episode was Ben’s third guest appearance on the show. If you missed his previous Mini Masterclass episodes on CX Strategy and the Foundations of a Great CX Program, be sure to listen to those.

Check out Ben’s tips for creating a CX Dashboard in this article he wrote for CX Accelerator. It covers many of the same insights shared with listeners in this episode. I’d encourage you to explore the other insights and thought leadership on CX Accelerator, as well as Ben’s blog. Both resources are packed with all sorts of other great gems and CX thought leadership. 

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain minor errors. For the best experience, please listen to the audio.

Welcome to Decoding the customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in.

If you’re new to the show, welcome. If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the customer.

These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills and performance to stand out as a CX professional. And an added note to those who are already CCXPs, the customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcast Listing towards certification renewal credits.

So be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to, so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 88, the second episode for the month of June 2020. And today, I’m featuring insights from a returning guest contributor, global thought leader, and Australian customer experience expert, Ben Motteram.

Ben is the founder and principal of Melbourne-based CX consulting company, CXpert. With over 25 years of experience working with some of Australia’s most recognizable brands, he’s helped many organizations become more human in the way they deal with customers and employees. His previous guest appearances on episodes 29 and 60 covered CX strategy and the foundations of a CX program.

Today, Ben shares his insight on building and utilizing a great customer experience dashboard. It was a topic request from me as Ben has done some excellent work in this space, and it builds nicely on the insights that he shared in episodes 29 and 60. A dashboard, after all, is about tracking and monitoring the progress of your CX strategy, and it’s a critically important tool for any CX program.

In this episode, Ben discusses the benefits and uses of a CX dashboard. He provides insights on how to build this with the end user in mind, including the types of metrics, the length, and the format. He also speaks about how to best distribute your dashboard once it’s up and running.

If you’re looking for a one-stop shop for expert guidance on why and how you should build a dashboard, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

Ben regularly shares his thoughts on all things related to customer experience, customer service, and employee engagement via his blog and on social media. So I’ll also include links to his blog and information about how to get in touch with Ben. Enjoy the show.

Thank you, Julia. It’s an honor to be back again today. Ever since you gave me today’s topic, I’ve been looking forward to talking about it.

So let’s get into it. So if you’re running a CX program, you need a way of communicating your progress to your superiors and the broader organization. All of us are guilty of not communicating enough sometimes.

So what’s required is something that will break down the walls of the CX department allowing everyone in the business to see how the organization is performing relative to customer expectations and the targets that the company has set for itself. This is both as a whole and within specific departments responsible for different parts of the customer journey. The instrument that many companies use to do this is a CX dashboard and these dashboards have many benefits.

Number one, they’re an easy to understand report card on your organization’s CX that enables readers to look at a variety of sources of information to gain a holistic understanding of how the company is performing. Number two, they facilitate organizational responsiveness because red flags or declining trends over time are easily picked out. Number three, they raise awareness about customer experience and engage employees in what you’re trying to achieve in the CX department by connecting achievement of CX outcomes to business success.

And finally, four, they help you as a CX manager, focus on the metrics that are most important. If you’re creating your company’s first CX dashboard, the first question you’re probably going to ask yourself is, okay, so what needs to be on it? But I actually think you should take a step back from there and ask yourself who will be reading it.

The information that goes on to your CX dashboard is going to be determined by who’s going to be consuming that information. Now, your executives are going to want headlines. They’re going to want your customer satisfaction or what some people call perception metrics, such as NPS, customer satisfaction, CSAT or customer effort score.

And these are normally shown overall and by journey stage. Your execs are also going to want to see key operational or what some people call descriptive metrics. And these are going to differ for every company.

But I’ll try and help you identify which ones you need to be tracking in a couple of minutes. Finally, they’re also going to want to see key outcome metrics which measure what action customers took as a result of their perceptions. These are the metrics that tie customer experience to organizational goals and can include things like sales figures, the number of complaints received, the number of positive online reviews that have been left, the number of demos requested if you own a car dealership, the number of test drives that have been requested.

So yeah, these are the actions that customers took. So that’s your executives. Other recipients of your dashboard may want the information broken down in more detail, for example, by customer journey stage, product type or customer segment, or they may want more than the headline metrics.

They may, for example, be the head of a department that is responsible for a specific part of the customer journey who wants to dive deeper in that particular area. Now how do you select which operational metrics you display on your dashboard? just as not every touch point is equal on a customer journey map, some touch points, most moments of truth, have a higher impact on customer perceptions than others.

Some metrics will measure things that have a higher impact on customer satisfaction than others. The key here is to understand the drivers of customer satisfaction in each of your journey stages. Now how you gain that understanding involves regression analysis on customer feedback data, which is well outside the realm of what we’re talking about today.

So I’m going to leave that for another day. The point I’m trying to make here is show the top one or two operational metrics that have the highest influence on customer satisfaction in each of your journey stages. When I was managing the CX Program for a large nationwide telecommunications company, I created a dashboard which had all of the headline metrics on the first page, which satisfied executives and 90% of the readers of the dashboard.

But I also had an additional four pages of data to satisfy the needs of the other 10% who wanted more granular detail. And I also added some commentary on the front page of the dashboard to provide context to the data both overall and by journey stage. So there you go, guys.

From having built one from scratch, that’s what made a good dashboard in my experience. The only other thing to consider when building a CX dashboard is how you’re going to distribute it, both the channels you use and how often you’re going to distribute it. Dashboard fatigue is definitely a thing, so you need to balance engaging employees in the company’s CX efforts with information overload.

At the telco I worked at, I produced my dashboard monthly and distributed it via e-mail to a group of senior stakeholders who then cascaded it to their teams. But CX dashboards can be integrated with other established dashboards, put on intranet pages, displayed on screens in the office, even printed and placed on a wall in the contact center. My advice is, do whatever you need to do to make it visible and keep it front of mind for everyone.

I hope that’s helped any of you who are creating your first CX dashboard. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn. I’ll be happy to answer them.

Thanks again for having me on the show, Julia. It is always a pleasure to be here. With that, I’ll hand back over to you.

That was special guest, Ben Motteram, taking us through the ins and outs of customer experience dashboards. Be sure to check out the show notes for this episode, for links to get in touch with Ben, and to find out more about his work. Many of the insights that he shared with us today are part of a blog post that he published late last year.

So, I’ll include a link to this article. Ben is very active on Twitter, so if you’re on that platform, he’s definitely one to follow. I’m a huge fan of social media as a means to connect to the global CX community.

If you and I aren’t already connected, let’s change that. I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. My Twitter handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and Ben’s handle is at CXpert.

Thanks for listening. If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show.

I’ll be back next Thursday, so be sure to tune in then or subscribe for updates when new episodes go live. I’ll see you next week.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including employee engagement, leadership alignment and CX strategy) or get in touch via email. 

So many experiences now happen in the digital realm. Whether that’s through a website, an app or via social media, most customer journeys have become at least somewhat digitized. And it’s probably safe to say this is becoming an even bigger trend with each passing year. Within that context, CX professionals need to understand how to integrate an understanding of experiences through digital touchpoints into the larger understanding of the overall customer journey. These metrics for digital experiences aren’t new, most of them have been around for a while, often used by digital operations, marketing or user experience teams, but it’s high time that CX professionals harness them as well.

There are a LOT of digital customer experience metrics. It would be impossible to cover all of them in a Mini Masterclass. The following includes a curated selection from different digital touchpoints based on both their prevalence and usefulness in the CX context. 

Footfall and conversion can be difficult to track for traditional in-person experiences. That’s definitely not the case online. From a web context, the key customer high level engagement measures would be page views, session duration and bounce rate. A bounce is any visitor who lands on a page, but doesn’t take any action. (Note: it’s not always a bad thing). Websites and apps can also track detailed behavior flows, or how customers navigate the different pages or actions. These measures are basically the digital equivalent of footfall and conversion, but the context of digital enables CX professionals to get so much more data about how consumers act and what interests them. Often this data can be tracked back to specific users as a way of measuring digital customer experiences over time.

Because many of these measures relate back to the sales funnel, marketing teams are a helpful first port of call if you are looking for website experience data in your organization.

CX professionals should also stay abreast of email marketing metrics, because this touchpoint still plays an important role in customer experience, especially if one is trying to stitch together an entire journey including inbound and outbound communication.  Some of the most popular measures include, open rate, which indicates if people are reading the message, unsubscribe rate, sharing or forwarding rate and the click through rate. This last measure highlights if customers are engaging with any calls-to-action within the message.

Some marketing teams put together timelines of customer engagement across email, text, call and other notifications, which can be very helpful for building a comprehensive customer journey. Of these, the digital touchpoints should yield the most readily available data about engagement. Remember that just because someone received a communication doesn’t always mean they engage with it, but it’s helpful for CX professionals to understand these points of interaction so they can be brought into the bigger picture.

Email can feel old school these days, but it’s undeniable that social media is on the rise as a part of many customer’s digital journeys. The great news is that social media has opened up a whole new world opportunities for measuring digital customer experience and understanding new dimensions of the journey. It can be helpful to understand digital social media metrics or measures through two different lenses, a push and a pull.

Marketing teams love to measure success of their curated content through things like Social Share of Voice, or mentions compared to competitors, the engagement rate relative to total followers, and the applaud rate, which tracks approval actions (likes, favorites and whatnot). These provide a glimpse into customer engagement with an organization’s social media presence and outbound messaging. Social media “push” metrics help CX teams understand possible points of interaction with a brand or where consumers might be getting information about products and services.

Increasingly, social media is also being used to provide service support and even to sell to customers. Standard sales and service metrics or measures like conversion rate, response time, resolution time and first contact resolution can all apply to social media touchpoints, as well as email, messenger or wherever sales and support are offered. Advanced text analytics also provide organizations with the ability to evaluate sentiment and conduct topic analysis to understand trends in the nature of engagement through social media and other channels.

Usability testing metrics are especially important if CX professionals are hoping to understand an app-based experience or a web portal where a customer might go to complete one of their jobs to be done, like paying their cell phone bill or checking a credit card statement. These are great for understanding the digital customer journey after the point of conversion.

Usability metrics are all based on a user’s experience completing a specific task, so they are journey-specific and you’ll need to identify what that task is first. Metrics include task completion rate, which is just what it sounds like. The error rate, or how many times a customer made an error or had to repeat an action. Average time to complete a task is also often gathered. Generally speaking, customers want things to be quick, easy and seamless. So CX teams will want to help their organizations work towards digital experiences that enable quick task completion, with minimal errors and low abandon rates. Digital operations teams should be able to pull samples of this information if they don’t already have some of it on hand.   

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

And an added note to those who are already CCXPs. The Customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcasts listening towards certification renewal credits. So be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 87, the first episode of June 2020.

It’s undeniable that digital experiences are becoming a larger and larger part of customer experience. We’re doing more through our phones and devices, and I would not be surprised if the current COVID-19 health crisis had a lasting impact on shifting trends even more in this direction. With that in mind, customer experience professionals need to be prepared to understand and leverage the right metrics and measures for these experiences. For some, this will be new territory.

So, I wanted to do a quick overview of some of the most important and popular metrics and measures for digitally based customer experiences. User experience teams often use these already. So, if you have a digital experience in your company, your digital operations or marketing team may already be capturing this stuff. But data is only as good as what it’s used for.

So, I’m going to give you an overview of what’s measured and how it can be used in the service of improving customer experience. So, if you are looking for some ideas about how to leverage digital experience metrics and measures to better understand the holistic customer journey, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and here’s something that you like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

As we all know, so many experiences now happen in the digital realm. Whether it’s through a website, an app, or via social media, most customer journeys have become at least somewhat digitized, and I think it’s safe to say that’s becoming more of the case with each passing year. Within this context, we as customer experience professionals need to understand how to integrate our understanding of experiences through these touch points into our larger knowledge of the overall customer journey. These metrics for digital experiences aren’t new.

Most of them have been around for a while. Often they’re used by digital operations, marketing, or user experience teams. But it’s high time that we harness them as well. I’ll say before I dive into this, that there are a lot of digital experience metrics out there.

There’s no way that I’d be able to cover all of them in one Mini Masterclass. So I’ve selected a handful from different types of digital touch points based on both their prevalence and their usefulness in a customer experience context. I wouldn’t want to send you on a wild goose chase after metrics that are difficult to gather or to share measures that have little meaning in the customer experience context. So I’m not going to do that.

I’ve curated this list with the needs of customer experience professionals in mind. Let’s start at a high level with engagement. How many customers are accessing a particular channel or touch point? From a web context, the key measure would be page views, session duration, and bounce rate.

A bounce is any visitor who lands on a page but doesn’t take any action. And it’s not always a bad thing. Websites and apps can also track detailed behavior flows or how customers navigate different pages and actions. These measures are basically the digital equivalent of footfall and conversion.

But the context of digital enables us to get so much more information about how consumers act and what interests them. Often this data can be tracked back to a specific user, so you can build a picture of their interactions over time. Because many of these measures relate back to the sales funnel, I find that marketing teams are a helpful first port of call if you’re going to be looking for website experience data in your organization. Sticking with marketing related data for a moment, I’d like to quickly touch on a couple of email marketing metrics.

Because believe it or not, this still plays an important role in customer experience, especially for trying to stitch together an entire journey. There are a number of metrics and measures applicable to email. Some of the most popular ones include open rate, which tells us if people are reading a message, the unsubscribe rate, the sharing or forwarding rate, and the click-through rate, which tells us if customers are engaging with any of the calls to action within messages. Some marketing teams put together timelines of customer engagement across email, text, call, and other notifications.

Of these, the digital touch points should yield the most readily available information about engagement. But remember that just because someone received a communication doesn’t always mean that they engage with it. That said, it’s helpful for us, as customer experience professionals, to understand these points of interaction as they play a role in the journey. Email feels old school these days, so moving a bit more into the current age, let’s also look at the key measures related to social media.

Within social media, I think we can look at customer engagement through two different lenses. A push lens and a pull lens. Marketing teams love to measure the success of their curated content through metrics like social share of voice, mentions compared to competitors, the engagement rate relative to total followers, and the applaud rate, which tracks approval actions, likes, favorites, and whatnot. These give us a glimpse into customer engagement with an organization’s social media presence and outbound messaging.

This data helps us understand possible points of interaction with a brand and where consumers might be getting information about products and services. Increasingly, social media is also being used to provide service support and even to sell to customers. Standard sales and service metrics are measures like conversion rate, response time, resolution time, first contact resolution, can all apply to social media touch points, as well as email, messenger, or really wherever sales and support are offered. Advanced text analytics also provides organizations with the ability to evaluate sentiment and to do topic analysis to understand trends in the nature of engagement through social media and other channels.

Finally, let’s take a look at some metrics for usability testing, which is especially important if we’re hoping to understand an app based experience or a web portal. Some place where a customer might go to complete one of their jobs to be done. Something like paying a cell phone bill or checking a credit card statement. These same metrics and measures can be used for transaction-based experiences as well.

But I just wanted to highlight that they’re really great for understanding the digital customer journey after the point of conversion. These usability metrics are all based on a user’s experience completing a specific task. So, you’ll need to identify that task first. Once you know what task you’re evaluating, you can assess task completion rate, which is just what it sounds like, the error rate or how many times a customer made an error or had to repeat an action.

You can also look into the average time to complete a task. Generally speaking, and this will come as no surprise, customers want things to be quick, easy, and seamless. So, you’ll want digital experiences that enable quick task completion with minimal errors and low abandon rates. If you have the ability to reach out to customers and gather, say, a customer effort score or a customer satisfaction score that’s also associated with the same job to be done, these customer experience metrics can add a nice robustness to a team’s understanding of the experience, how it worked, and then how customers feel about it.

If you’re scratching your head about where to get the user experience data, I’d head straight to your digital operations team. They should be able to pull samples of this information if they don’t have it on hand already. As you can imagine, digital experience data in general can be a veritable goldmine of insights about parts of the customer journey that have moved into the digital realm. And it’s even more powerful if we have the ability to connect it back to experiences that are offline, things that happen in person, like retail shopping or calling a contact center.

Sadly, I see the data most often lives within the silo where it was created or gathered. But customer experience professionals can be the ones to bring the pieces together, or at least raise the flag about the importance of establishing a single view of customer experience across touch points. The data gathered by each organization is different. But I hope that this mini masterclass has at least equipped you to understand what might be available and some of the lingo if you decide to go to your colleagues in marketing or digital operations and ask them to collaborate with you.

If you are looking for help uniting customer data from across your organization to create a holistic understanding of the customer journey, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, Tweet or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share it with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show. I’ll be back next week with another episode.

I’ll see you then.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email. 

There is a lot of focus on building empathy with customer-facing teams. This makes sense, but we can’t forget that customer-centric culture is about rallying an entire organization around the customer, not just a few select teams. It’s great if employees on the front lines can connect with others, remain in touch with the context of customers’ lives and demonstrate this through their actions. But to maximize the impact of customer-centric culture, those team members who are defining experiences, building platforms or making strategic decisions also need to be able to relate to the customer. CX professionals need a multi-pronged approach to foster empathy in CX teams and across the whole organization.

The following 3 activities have been curated with a wide ranging audience in mind. Empathy is a difficult thing to “teach”, so these activities are designed to gently guide people to the “ah-ha” moment where they see this for themselves. Once team members connect with what it means to feel empathy towards another, the next step is to help them apply this to the context of customers and then flex and train this muscle so they know how to use it.

This activity involves explaining a modern object, like a TV, car or cell phone to someone who lived 200 years ago (or 500 years ago or who comes from a different planet). The group should be divided into teams of two. One team member role plays the modern day person describing the object, while the other person asks clarifying questions based on the perspective of someone who lived 200 years ago. After a few minutes, ask them to swap roles and repeat the conversation about a different object.

To wrap up, facilitate a brief group discussion, asking the participants how it felt to put themselves in the shoes of someone who lived so long ago, as well as what it was like trying to explain a normal everyday object to a person who has a completely different context for the world. The idea is to get participants thinking about context of others and what it means to relate to someone with a different perspective on life. During your debrief discussion, connect the activity back to your customer base by asking participants what disconnects might exist between their frame of reference and that of your typical customer.

This activity is quick and easy. It’s a fun icebreaker and can sow the seeds that foster empathy or reinforce the right empathetic mindset.

This activity requires a little bit of preparation, but it’s totally worth it. It’s another great activity for a broad group of participants, and works well for a team offsite or another setting where facilitators have the luxury of time. To prepare, establish several customer personas (if you’re unsure about what customer personas are, be sure to check out episode 40). Next, identify a typical job to be done or customer journey for each persona and a possible hurdle the customer might face.

To facilitate the activity, assemble your group of participants and divide them into teams of 4-5 people. Provide each team with an example persona and scenario. Ask one person within each team to assume the role of the persona. This team member should introduce themselves as the persona and explain their customer journey, as well as the scenario information that you’ve provided. Their team has the opportunity to ask questions and get to know the fictitious example customer before working on a course of action to address the issue they are facing along the customer journey. Depending on the group, I’d suggest giving them anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to get to know their team persona and discuss an intervention.

To conclude the activity, each team can present their persona and suggested next steps to the large group. During the debrief, be sure to probe with questions about how the team understood and related to the customer’s wants, needs, feelings and expectations, as well as how this influenced their course of action. This activity should not only foster empathy, but also get people thinking about how they can translate an empathetic understanding of the customer to improvements in the customer journey.

When preparing for this, remember that the facilitator should have as many personas and corresponding journey challenges as there are teams. Pro tip: marketing departments sometimes have personas on hand so that facilitators don’t need to build these from scratch.

This activity is truly the Goldilocks of empathy building exercises. It works with nearly any audience, can be facilitated as a quick ice breaker or a longer activity with the inclusion of an in-depth discussion.

When all participants are present, ask them to write down the most ridiculous or outlandish customer request they’ve ever heard. It could be something they’ve heard from one of their customers or something they’ve observed in their own personal experience as a consumer. After they’ve written down their outlandish customer request on a piece of paper, they should pass this to the person on their right, who now needs to come up with a backstory that justifies the seemingly strange request.

The reasoning and backstory can be as outlandish as the customer request itself. It doesn’t matter. The point is to get people thinking about what might have motivated an otherwise bizarre-sounding customer request and then relating to the customer’s situation. The act of understanding another can foster empathy and trigger a totally different emotional response to a situation.

To close out this activity ask participants to turn to the person who gave them the customer request scenario and explain the backstory they came up with. If you have time, select a few participants to share their examples and discuss as a group.

Creating a culture of empathy won’t happen overnight. These activities won’t magically flip the switch on team culture and mindset, but if they become part of a CX professional’s arsenal of employee engagement efforts, they will start to make an impact over time. The key is to be consistent and to help create those “ah-ha” moments, along with subtle reinforcement.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

And, an added side note for those who are already CCXPs, the Customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcasts listening toward certification renewal credits. So be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 86, the fourth episode of May 2020. Today, I’d like to talk about empathy, which is the ability to understand and feel the emotions of another person by putting yourself in their shoes.

At the time of recording this episode, the world is still reeling from the health crisis brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. At this moment, consumers are seeking both empathy and compassion from the brands they know and trust. But empathy wasn’t any less important before the crisis, and it will be just as important, if not more, as we emerge into the new normal. Understanding customers and the context of their lives is the foundation of experience design.

It’s also the cornerstone of customer-centric culture, and one of the ways that we as customer experience professionals can rally teams around the customer. Empathy might be especially top of mind now, but it certainly isn’t going anywhere. So today, I’m going to give you three activities that you can use to help support a culture of empathy in your organization. These activities are varied.

I’ve got ideas that work with customer-facing teams and the corner office. While these are designed to be standalone activities, the concepts behind these exercises can be adapted so you can even make them subtle enough to weave into discussions or use as a meeting icebreaker without making a big fuss about it. So, if you’re looking for some ideas and inspiration on how to help team members at all levels build empathy for the customer, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down.

You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I see a lot of focus on building empathy with customer-facing teams. This makes sense, but we can’t forget that customer-centered culture is about rallying an entire organization around the customer, not just a few select teams. If those on the front lines are very much in touch with the context of customers’ lives, able to relate to them, and demonstrate this through their actions, then that’s all great, but it will have a limited impact if in other parts of the business, those who are defining experiences, building platforms, or making strategic decisions are unable to relate to the customer at all.

So I’ve built this list of suggested activities with a wide ranging audience in mind. I’m also of the opinion that it’s difficult to teach empathy as a concept and much more effective to gently guide people to an aha moment where they see this for themselves. Once people connect with what it means to feel empathy towards a customer, then it’s about helping them flex and train this muscle so they know when and how to use it. With that, let’s dive into the first activity.

This is a bit of a fun one. This activity involves explaining a modern object like a TV, a car, or a cell phone to someone who lived 200 years ago. Divide your group into teams of two. Have one person roleplay the modern day person describing the object and the other person asking questions based on the perspective of someone who lived 200 years ago.

It could even be 500 years ago if you want to. After a few minutes, ask them to swap roles. When you wrap up, ask the group how it felt to put themselves in the shoes of another person who lived so long ago, and also what it was like trying to explain something to someone who has a completely different context for the world. The idea is to get participants thinking about context and understanding others.

During your debrief discussion, connect the activity back to your customer base by asking participants what disconnects might exist between their frame of reference and that of your typical customer. This is a great one for a meeting where you are already pulling the team mindset away from their day-to-day activities. In that setting, this activity can be a nice icebreaker because it’s quite a quick one. I also think it works with a broad audience, from customer service reps to executives.

It’s quirky and fun. Just make sure that your group is in the right mindset. The next activity requires a bit of preparation, but it’s totally worth it. And it’s another great activity for a broad, diverse group of participants.

First, develop some customer personas. If you’re unsure about what customer personas are, be sure to check out episode 40. Next, identify a typical job to be done, or a customer journey, for this persona, and then a possible hurdle or a challenge that the persona might face. When you get your group of participants together, divide them into teams of four to five people.

Ask one person within the team to assume the role of the persona. This team member will read the persona example and explain the background information and scenario to others in their team. Then the team has the opportunity to ask questions and get to know our pretend customer before working on a course of action for how to help with the issue that this pretend customer is facing along their journey. At the end of the activity, each team can present their persona and the suggested next steps to the other groups.

During the debrief, be sure to probe with questions about how the team understood and related to the customer’s wants, needs, feelings, and expectations, as well as how this influenced their course of action. This particular activity requires a little more time to facilitate than the first example activity, so it’s an excellent one for a team off-site or when you have the luxury of time. When preparing for this, remember that you should have as many personas and corresponding journey challenges as there are teams. Your marketing department might have some personas on hand so that you don’t have to start this from scratch.

My third and final activity is the Goldilocks of empathy building activities. I think it works well with nearly any audience and it’s something that you can facilitate in 10 to 15 minutes or you can easily turn it into a longer activity with an in-depth follow-up discussion. For this one, ask your participants to write down the most ridiculous or outlandish customer request they’ve ever heard. It could be something they’ve heard from one of your customers or something they’ve seen or heard in their own personal experience as a consumer.

After they’ve written down their outlandish customer request in a piece of paper, they should pass this to the person to their right who now needs to read the request and come up with a backstory that justifies a seemingly strange request. I’ll give you an example just for context so you can see how this works. Let’s say that you’re participating in this activity and you receive a piece of paper from your colleague about a scenario involving a customer who’s making a scene at a local pizzeria because they’re insisting that their pizza be cut into squares instead of the traditional pizza wedges. It doesn’t sound particularly logical, but that’s not the point.

You are now tasked with inventing a backstory to justify this request. Your answer might be that the customer has a fussy eater child at home who refuses to eat pizza and wedge slices, or that the customer has a phobia of pizza wedges. The reasoning can be as outlandish as the customer request itself. It doesn’t matter.

The point is to get people thinking about and relating to what might have motivated an otherwise bizarre sounding customer request, and then empathize with the customer, understanding that everybody has a backstory and that we’re all humans. To close out this activity, ask participants to turn to the person who gave them the customer request scenario and explain the reasoning that they came up with. It can also be fun to pick a few participants to share their examples and discuss as a group. This activity can be adapted to almost any environment or audience.

It works really well as an icebreaker for a small group or as a longer activity if you want to integrate a nice reflective discussion at the end. So there you have it, three activities to help foster empathy among your team. Let me know if you try any of these out. I’d love to hear about the results.

If you’re looking for help getting teams to relate to the customer, please get in touch. I do a lot of work in this space, especially with leadership teams, and I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps other people find the show. I’ll be back next week with another episode.

See you then.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email. 

If you get a group of CX professionals together, at some point the conversation will turn to metrics and measures. It’s inevitable. Largely because metrics and measures are the core of how CX teams validate insights, track their progress, and prove their worth the business. So it should come as no surprise that this is a keen area of interest for continued learning and that conversations on the pros and cons of different metrics have been known to stir up emotions.

Given the importance of CX metrics, the topic has been covered quite extensively on the podcast. At least 7 Mini Masterclass episodes to date have featured topics related to CX metric. It was high time for a round up guide to customer experience metrics, and no better way to mark the milestone of the 85th episode. 

In episode 28, guest expert, CX thought leader and former CEO of the CXPA, Diane Magers, outlines the difference between metrics, measure and business value. These are terms that many CX professionals use interchangeably, but it’s important to clarify what these are and how they apply to customer experience management. No guide to customer experience metrics would be complete without baseline definitions of the key terms. Diane broke down her definitions of each:

For more on this, be sure to check out episode 28.

Episode 31 explored 3 of the most common CX metrics out there, Customer Satisfaction or CSAT, Net Promoter Score, otherwise known as NPS and a newer kid on the block Customer Effort Score. Each one has a unique methodology and brings as different type of insights to the table. Be sure to listen to episode 31 if you want an overview of the 3 juggernaut metrics of the CX world.

Episode 33 was a special deep dive into the pros and cons of Net Promoter Score, as it is undoubtedly the most controversial metric of the bunch. NPS was developed by Fred Reicheld, a notable thought leader and management consultant. The metric was introduced to the world through a Harvard Business Review article, so it caught the attention of executives and helped shine the spotlight on CX, but many CX professionals now feel increasingly shackled to a metric that doesn’t explain the full picture of customer experience, which by the way – no single metric will ever be able to do in isolation. There are many well documented issues with the way that NPS is measured and used.

My professional opinion is that NPS has its place as a CX metric, but only in the right context. It is better suited as a dipstick on customer perceptions of a brand across their entire journey and not as performance measure for customer-facing teams. That recommendation only stands if the right methodology is used, which it’s often not. Check out episode 33 for more details.

One metric used in isolation won’t provide the full picture of an organization’s performance or progress towards customer-centricity. There isn’t a singular guide to customer experience metrics, but it is widely acknowledged that CX teams should leverage a variety of metrics to create a full picture of CX. Episode 32 explores how different metrics and measures can be used in concert by classifying them as leading or lagging indicators and then bringing them together to establish a holistic understanding.

Leading indicators are measures that precede or feed into a customer experience. These should indicate whether or not an experience will be successful. E.g. wait time, processing time, product availability, system downtime, product quality. These are all components that might contribute to customer experience. Leading indicators help predict the outcomes of experiences and many of them can be measured and monitored before experiences even happen. They can be used to proactively intervene when experiences start going sideways and make for great CX KPIs (see more on that below).

Lagging indicators follow a customer experience. These should indicate whether or not an experience was successful. Customer retention and the “Big 3” metrics covered in episode 31 are all examples of lagging indicators. They help us understand “how we did” and are important for monitoring progress or for tracking the impact of customer experience efforts over time. When teams use leading and lagging indicators together, it empowers them take charge of delivering good experiences and then monitor the outcomes.

A guide to customer experience metrics wouldn’t be complete without some ideas on how to put these CX tools to work. Episodes 53 and 73 do just that.

Metrics can be very helpful for driving organizational alignment around customer centric-goals. Episode 53, looked at CX KPIs as an application for CX metrics and measures. The key is to find metrics or measures that connect a team or individual’s day to day responsibilities to customer outcomes. This is generally easier to do for customer-facing teams than those working behind the scenes, but ideally everyone should be accountable to a KPI or two that connects their work back to the customer mandate. For more detail on establishing CX KPIs and potential pitfalls to look out for, be sure to check out episode 53.

CX professionals can get so worked up about metrics, because they’re the way that CX teams prove the worth of their efforts to the business. Episode 73 provides some recommendations on how CX leaders can use those metrics and measures to demonstrate the impact that customer experience is having on the business. Customer experience metrics can be used to highlight efficiency gains, quantify the value of referrals and demonstrate how a better understanding of the customer has led to improved business outcomes. Those are just a few of the recommendations covered in episode 73.

In episode 63, special guest and CX expert Stephanie Thum shared 4 common mistakes with how teams use metrics and what CX leaders can do to avoid these. If you are in the process of setting up a CX metrics framework or are busy reflecting on how you can improve the one currently in place, be sure to check out episode 63. Stephanie covers everything from how to share metrics that you think might make the situation look bad to establishing the right cadence for measurement. Stephanie has become a special ongoing contributor to the show, and ALL of her episodes are well worth a listen!

If you’ve reached the end of this guide to customer experience metrics and are thinking “I’m applying all of the CX metrics best practices, but my executive team still isn’t listening”, you might just be speaking the wrong language. CX metrics carry weight with CX professionals because we understand their value (and pitfalls!). If you want to your message to resonate with business leaders, consider framing CX performance in terms of business results, aka the ROI of CX. For more on this, including how you can leverage existing CX metrics to demonstrate business impact, be sure to check out my Ultimate Guide to the ROI of Customer Experience.

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional and an added note to those who are already CCXPs.

The Customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcasts listening towards certification renewal credits. So be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 85, the third episode of May 2020. I can’t believe this show has reached 85 episodes.

It feels like yesterday that I launched the Mini Masterclass series, but it was actually 18 months ago. Time really flies when you’re having fun. And now that we’ve got so many episodes to pull from, I thought I’d try something a little different for today’s show. For this episode, I’m going to do a round up of everything I and my guest expert contributors have covered to date on CX Metrics and Measures.

This is one of the most important topics for CX professionals. And it’s been the focus of at least seven mini masterclasses so far. Today, I’m going to pull together the highlights, key takeaways, and let you know where to go to get more information. If you are looking for a one stop shop overview of CX metrics and guidance on where to learn more, then stay tuned.

As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com, or decodingthecustomer.com. I swear, if you get a group of customer experience professionals together, at some point, the conversation will turn to metrics and measures. It’s inevitable, guaranteed.

And why is that? Well, I think it’s because metrics and measures are the core of how customer experience teams validate insights, track their progress, and most importantly, prove their worth to the business. So, it should come as no surprise that this is a keen area of interest for continued learning and that conversations on the pros and cons of different metrics have been known to stir up emotions. This topic has been covered quite extensively on the podcast, and that’s why I’ve picked it as the focus for this roundup.

So, let’s start at the very beginning by defining metrics, measures, and business value. In episode 28, guest expert, CX thought leader, and former CEO of the CXPA, Diane Magers, outlines the difference between metrics, measures, and business value. These are terms that many CX professionals use interchangeably. But it’s important to clarify what these are and how they apply to customer experience management.

Diane broke down her definitions for each. Measures. These are anything that you can count. Number of clients that come into your store, call length, frequency of purchase, stuff like that.

Metrics. Metrics are outcomes of something that’s happened, including a customer’s perception of those outcomes. So this would include things like customer satisfaction, a customer effort score, metrics like that. And finally, value.

Value represents the financial levers that you can pull in an organization and or the resulting financial impact. So this would include cost to serve, revenue, expense, profit per customer, just to name a few examples. For more on this, be sure to go back and check out episode 28. In episode 31, I took a look at three of the most common CX metrics out there.

Customer Satisfaction or CSAT, Net Promoter Score, otherwise known as NPS, and a newer kid on the block, Customer Effort Score. Each one has a unique methodology and brings a different type of insight to the table. Be sure to listen to episode 31 if you want an overview of the three juggernaut metrics of the CX world. In episode 33, I specifically took on Net Promoter Score, looking at the pros and cons of this metric, as it is undoubtedly the most controversial of the bunch.

NPS was developed by Fred Reicheld, a notable thought leader and management consultant. NPS was introduced to the world through the Harvard Business Review. So it caught the attention of executives and helped shine the spotlight on customer experience. But many CX professionals now feel increasingly shackled to a metric that doesn’t explain the full picture of customer experience, which by the way, no single metric will ever do in isolation.

There are many well-documented issues with the way that Net Promoter Score is measured and used. My personal professional opinion is that NPS has its place as a CX metric, but only in the right context. It’s really better suited as a dipstick on customer perceptions of a brand across the entire journey, and not, I repeat, not, as a measure for customer-facing teams. And that only stands if the right methodology is used to measure Net Promoter Score, which all too often it’s not.

Check out episode 33 for more details. Since we know that one metric in isolation won’t give us the full picture of an organization’s performance or progress towards customer centricity, I dedicated episode 32 to exploring how different metrics and measures can be used in concert by classifying them as leading and lagging indicators, and then bringing those together to establish a holistic understanding of customer experience. Leading indicators are measures that precede or feed into customer experience. These should indicate whether or not an experience will be successful.

It would include things like wait time, processing time, product availability, system downtime, product quality. All of these are components that might contribute to customer experience. Leading indicators help predict the outcomes of experiences, and many of them can be measured and monitored before experiences happen. They can be used to proactively intervene when experiences start going sideways, and they make for great customer experience KPIs.

More on that in just a minute. Lagging indicators follow a customer experience. These should indicate whether or not an experience was successful. Customer retention and the big three metrics covered in Episode 31 are all examples of lagging indicators.

They help us understand how we did, and they’re important for monitoring progress or for tracking the impact of customer experience over time. When teams use leading and lagging indicators together, it empowers them to take charge of delivering good experiences, and then monitor the outcomes. In Episode 53, I looked at CX KPIs as another application for CX metrics and measures. Metrics can be very helpful for driving organizational alignment around customer-centric goals.

The key is to find metrics or measures that connect a team or individual’s day-to-day responsibilities to customer outcomes. This is generally a lot easier to do for customer-facing teams than those working behind the scenes. But ideally, everyone should have a KPI or two that connects their work back to the customer mandate. For more detail on establishing CX KPIs and the potential pitfalls to look out for, be sure to check out Episode 53.

My next and penultimate episode in this roundup also includes practical tips on how to use metrics. In Episode 63, special guest and CX expert Stephanie Thum shared four common mistakes with how teams use metrics and how you can avoid these. If you’re in the process of setting up a CX metrics framework or are busy reflecting on how you can improve the one you’ve currently got in place, be sure to check out Episode 63. Stephanie covers everything from how to share metrics that you think might make a situation look bad to establishing the right cadence for measurement.

Stephanie has become a regular contributor on the show. Her insights are fantastic, and I definitely recommend you check out her episodes. Finally, in Episode 73, I provided some recommendations on how you can use those metrics and measures to demonstrate the impact that customer experience is having on the business. This is what it’s all about, right?

And why CX professionals can get so worked up about metrics? Because they’re the way that we prove our worth to the business. So customer experience professionals need to use those numbers to highlight things like efficiency gains, quantify the value of referrals, and to demonstrate how a better understanding of the customer has led to improve business outcomes. So there you have it, a comprehensive roundup of the Mini Masterclass episodes that have been dedicated to CX metrics and measures.

And a bit of a listener guide to anyone looking to learn more on this topic. If you’re looking for help measuring customer experience or demonstrating the business value of CX efforts, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message.

My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show.

I’ll be back next week with another episode. I’ll see you then.

If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.

Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services  (including journey mapping, CX strategy development, experience innovation, leadership workshops and CX ROI measurement) or get in touch via email.