How to Measure Your Digital Customer Experience

"What you don’t measure, you can’t improve"- Peter Drucker

Customer experience is expected to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by the end of 2020. While many business leaders recognise the need to develop a coherent digital customer experience (DCX) strategy, many still lack confidence in their ability to measure DCX success reliably.

A 2018 Smarter CX Insights report showed that only 32% of customer experience professionals feel they have access to the information they need to understand customers’ needs and previous interactions, and can apply it to improve their experience.

In the same report, 41% of professionals don’t feel confident they have the information necessary to truly comprehend their consumers, which would, in turn, enable them to deliver better experiences.

Implementing effective digital customer experience strategies starts with brands measuring consumers’ behaviours and how they interact with them across several digital spaces; and then, be able to extract useful insights that help them improve customer experience.

But, if you feel you don’t know where to begin to measure your digital customer experience, you are not alone. According to the report quoted earlier, 57% of CX professionals say they are unsure of what to measure to indicate their customer experience strategy is getting better.

Before we dive into how brands can measure their DCX campaigns, here’s a quick overview of what an exceptional digital customer experience is.

What is a Digital Customer Experience?

When prospects search online for a related product and service to your offerings, whether on Google, social media or online forums, even without visiting your website, the interactions often leave them with opinions about your brand.

The experience, which takes into account all the digital touchpoints, is what we call digital customer experience. DCX is omnichannel and is the sum of all the experience customers have with a brand in their journey to becoming buyers.

How to Measure the Success of Your Digital Customer Experience

So, how can brands effectively measure their digital customer experience?

Before a brand can begin to measure their digital customer experience, they need to have these three things in place:

• Identify key customer base whose experience you want to measure

While it may be tempting to want to focus on every customer, the reality is, certain customer segments are more important to a business than others. 

For these customer segments, you want to make their experience at every touchpoint, as frictionless as possible.

• Identify key moments of truths to measure

Ideally, you want a digital customer experience that delights prospects across every phase of the buyer’s journey. Unfortunately, that might be taking on too much, especially when you are just starting.

What you want to do is to identify critical moments of truths to measure; then use the insights gained to improve them. 

• Identify DCX metrics that have the most impact on the business bottom line

No two businesses have the same objectives – company A may only be interested in growing the number of paying subscribers while company B wants to reduce cart abandonment.

For DCX professionals, it is vital to identify DCX metrics that have an impact on business objectives.  

Here are three digital customer experience metrics to track, but of course, these are by no means, the only metrics to measure.

Depending on the goal and niche, brands can choose, in addition to the three metrics below, to measure consumer sentiments, first response time and even buyer’s remorse.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT measures customers’ satisfaction about their experience with a product, service or company.

The CSAT score provides insight into how customers feel and what they think about the quality of service or product they just received. For example, you can ask customers to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 10 after downloading and using your mobile app.

To get a complete picture of customer satisfaction across the whole funnel, be sure to provide surveys at each touchpoint of the journey. 

When paired with follow-up questions like ‘why did you give the rating you did?’ or asking them what they think the company can do better, you can quickly learn in the customer’s voice what’s working or what needs to improve.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS consists of two simple questions and is used by companies all over the world including big multinationals to gauge their customers’ engagement and brand loyalty.

By asking customers how likely they are to recommend their company or service to others. And, then following up with an open-ended question, ‘Why did you give that score?’ brands can learn about their most and least loyal audience.

The score is ranked on a scale of 0-10, where 0 indicates the least engaged and loyal customer, while 10 indicates a satisfied and highly engaged customer who isn’t going to be swayed by competitors and is very willing to recommend the company to friends and colleagues.

With the Net Promoter Score companies can predict with a level of certainty their future revenue since according to a report by London School of Economics, an average NPS increase of 7% correlates on average with a 1% growth in revenue.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

94% of customers say they are likely to return to a brand that provided an effortless experience compared to 4% who went through a high level of effort.

Customer Effort Score measures ease of use of brand’s channels. The CES indicates how much effort customers put in to accomplish a task.

Brands use CES to track the simplicity of the solution they provide. For example, the customer effort score can show how easy it is for customers to navigate the brand’s website or use their mobile app or how easy it was to download an ebook or contact support.

With CES, brands can quickly see where customers are struggling along the buyer’s journey and move in to improve it.

Strategies to Collect Customer Insights and Feedback

In this section, we explore three methods brands can implement to track their digital customer experience.

Conduct Surveys

Probably the easiest to implement since it does not require complicated processes to deploy.

All you are required to do is set up your DCX survey at the touchpoints that have been identified. Decide on the type of survey you want to conduct, though this will depend on the metrics you want to measure.

NPS, CSAT and CES are some of the most common DCX surveys to run. When setting up the survey for the first time, be sure to start small, instead of going all-in at once. 

Dig Into Website Analytics

Analysing website analytics can offer insights into traffic sources, high performing pages, and drop-off points in the customer journey.

If, for example, a customer complained of difficulty in checking out, you can look at that page’s analytics to see how many other people dropped off on that page too.

Integrate Real-Time Tracking Software

Tracking customer behaviour on the frontend can help you see in real-time what content, call-to-actions and design elements customers interact with as they navigate the website.

It is also an effective method to discover where visitors are struggling. With the data, you can then provide a more personalised browsing experience and or remove the friction. 

Measuring the digital customer experience is the first step in ensuring organisations continue to provide exceptional brand experience for their customers. By measuring DCX, companies know how their efforts directly impact the business bottom line.

While many marketers say they're not sure how to measure the success of their digital customer experience, there are a number of metrics that can be measured with little effort and that have a big impact on the success of the customer experience.