Why Marketers Need To Use Authentic CX Metrics?

The ability to deliver exceptional Customer experience (CX) can be achieved by focusing on customers’ objectives, which in turn should be the primary organizational goal. Moreover, the success of the ability has to be measured regularly and used as an indicator to define the organization’s tactics to achieve that goal.

Hence, choosing the right metrics is critical. However, many digital marketers measure the success using traditional metrics such as website traffic, the number of pages browsed or the bounce rate.

While these metrics may serve the purpose of measuring the ROI on the website, they may not assess the real experience of a customer who has visited the site. It’s because marketing has always been defined in terms of leads.

The higher the number of leads they can feed to sales, the better is the performance of the marketing team. Thus, marketers get obsessed with lead generation. In the bid to get more leads, every action they initiate becomes a tactical activity. The focus shifts on getting the personal data of the customers as quickly as possible, so that they can be bombarded with offers that hardly makes sense to them.

As a result, the objective of helping the customers to perform their tasks with minimal effort is lost in the hysteria of reaching the monthly and quarterly target of stipulated leads.

On the other hand, focusing on the right metrics can help them to ensure the customers leave satisfied with what they were able to achieve from the website. Some of these metrics that can be considered for the purpose are discussed below:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

It is one of the useful metrics that allows businesses to find out exactly how their customers feel about them. Developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, this customer loyalty metric is quite simple, which is its biggest advantage. However, it’s still relevant to all levels and functions of an organization and can be a leading indicator of the overall performance of a website, and even the company itself.

The metric identifies the level of customer loyalty by asking them a simple question –
“On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend the [company name, website] to your friends, family or business associates, with 0 being the least?”

Customers, who give a ‘6’ or below are termed as ‘Detractors’, while those who give ‘7’ or ‘8’ are called ‘Passives’. Those who give ‘9’ or ‘10’ are known as ‘Promoters’.

To calculate the NPS, all you need to do is to subtract the percentage-points of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. It is that simple. So, if 40% of respondents were Promoters and 15% were Detractors, your NPS is 25.

As it gives an uncomplicated insight into a customer’s loyalty spectrum, moving towards a score of 100 will ideally show that you are able to deliver an enhanced customer experience.

Visitor Intent Score

The amount of data on visitor-activity on various devices such as mobiles, laptops, and desktops, continues to increase. It has converted these digital touch points as the primary channels to measure customer experience. By going beyond behavioral metrics such as conversion rate and time on site, marketers can get a deeper insight into the hearts and minds of customers.

The ability to track the feedback in the context of their intentions can help identify the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’. One of the ideal ways is to know whether they could complete their desired tasks or not.

Pioneered by Avinash Kaushik and iPerceptions, an easy way to deploy website survey solution for web analytics practitioners, called 4Q, was developed. The method uses a ‘Purpose of visit’ (PoV) question, which could be as simple as – ‘Which of the following best describes your primary purpose?’

The goal is to label the visitor-behavior with their stated intent, which exposes the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ of behavioral web analytics. Hence, a single select format to track the response is much better than the multiple select options, as it can risk confusing the visitors.

Also, the number of possible responses for a ‘single select’ question should ideally be 4 or less, which could lead to better segmentation and more accurate analysis.

Average Task Completion Rate

Task completion is one of the basic usability metrics, because if website visitors cannot complete what they wish to do on a site, then nothing else matters. However, the completion of a task and its success rate depends on the context.

In some context, anything above 50% can be termed as a major accomplishment, while in some cases anything less than even 90% may not be considered sufficient. Hence, it’s important to define the objective accordingly, while the customer’s perspective should always remain the primary focus.

So, whichever be the metrics, marketers need to ensure their objectives match the customers’, or they will be unable to solve the real issue. The times when marketing could influence customers have ended and delivering a superior customer experience is the only way that leads to growth and profitability.