How Do You Measure Customer Joy?
What KPIs are your organization tracking to measure your customers’ experience? How do you compare to your competitors? Are you checking often enough?
I’ve had the opportunity to sit in a room with CMOs, CTOs, CSOs and many forms of Senior Market Researchers at some of the biggest companies in the world and ask exactly these questions. The rooms are always different, everything from a conference room at the four seasons to a private innovation playground in a sprawling compound - but the answers are always the same.
Limitations of classic surveys and NPS
Traditionally, the closest proxy we as marketers have for this is a survey based NPS score. Anyone fully satisfied with these?
It’s a great concept on paper. You tell us if you’d recommend our product to your friends. Based on what number you give us, we infer that’s how much you “like” our product. Now how do we figure out what it is about our product they actually like? Construct a survey and ask! How do we reach more people? Do more surveys! How do we compare this to your competitors? Um, more surveys? How frequently can we get fresh data this way? Sporadically!
Pushing past old limitations
There’s a new way to measure experiences. Breakthrough data science techniques from medical diagnoses are now starting to be used by some of the world’s best teams to quantify qualitative data. With this emerging field dubbed, “computational psychology”, we can now start to measure the psychological impact of every individual aspect of an experience by analyzing customer feedback in a precise new way. By taking a customer’s review, support ticket, or customer service request, this technique analyzes the word choice, syntax, and other unique signals to differentiate what is being said and felt. Yes I said felt. We can now understand a person’s underlying feelings from text. All we need to do now is find customers talking about our products and aim this new technique at this data.
Lucky us
The lucky thing is the larger the organization the more customer data there is. Now, we can instantly look at how every customer segment feels about any specific part of their experience. Maybe our product brings far more joy when it does its job versus a close competitor. Maybe we’re not highlighting this in our marketing yet (we should asap!). Maybe we realize that the job done that brings our customers the most joy was actually a subset of a larger job that obfuscated the true source of this delight. What if we could turn up the proverbial knob on all parts of the experience our customers love and then systematically address every part of the experience that causes anxiety or anger. How would this impact brand perception, long-term growth and our bottom lines?
About Dmitriy Pavlov:
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Stitched Insights. An innovative product leader in emerging machine learning technology. Passionate about user experience, digital marketing and data-driven growth.
