Customer Experience Management Best Practice: Monitor Your Customer Experience KPIs

When I talk to ebusiness leaders, they can almost always name a number of factors that affect their customers’ online experience. The most customer-centric of them have set up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that measure the incidence of these factors and alert them to changes or trends. At the simplest level, this can be just tracking overall page performance metrics on the site; but there are many other metrics that end up having a bigger effect on customer experience.

For example, one of our online travel provider customers uses Tealeaf to track a KPI for validating itinerary purchases. Many tasks happen during the final step in a travel purchase: accessing airline and hotel reservation systems, validating information entered, processing credit card information, and more. Small glitches in any of these tasks can prevent the transaction from being processed completely. Simply by tracking whether customers went to a purchase confirmation page after they clicked on the purchase button, our customer was able to identify glitches that represented millions of dollars of lost business.

The most common KPIs I see are set up around “known bad behaviors” such as:

• Multiple attempts of key processes without success: For example, a user tried to log in three times and failed, a user searched for a product three times without getting any results, a user went through the purchase process three times but never purchased, etc.
• Multiple attempts to submit a form without success: For example, a user received a form validation message such as “enter valid address” more than three times, a user was asked to accept payment terms more than three times, etc.

Or, they are based on “known bad experiences” that can be tracked:

• Technical issues such as slow page performance, global error pages, or unexpected error messages such as “SQL exception.”
• Business issues: These vary depending on the type of site and industry but could include seeing an out-of-stock message on a retail site, having an itinerary re-priced on a travel site, or having account qualification issues on a financial services site.
• Customer issues: Actual customer behavior that indicates a bad experience such as going to the customer feedback form or help page.

A final set of KPIs are based on unexpected outcomes. These are outcomes that deviate from the defined business processes on the site, as in the itinerary purchase validation example above. The most common areas I see tracked involve:

• Validating steps with heavy back-end processing, for example checkout on a retail site or purchase itinerary on a travel site. If the next page shown to the user is not a purchase confirmation, something went wrong.
• Validating steps after partner activity, for example payment processing for a credit card. Once this partner activity completes, the expected behavior would be that the customer would return to the site’s process.

All of these different KPIs can be rolled up into a single overall customer experience KPI that you can easily track for your site.

People ask me if you have to deploy a customer experience management tool like Tealeaf to track KPIs; the answer is no. You can get started by tracking the KPIs that can be captured with existing web analytics or performance management tools. But there are many important KPIs that can’t be tracked without a customer experience management tool such as Tealeaf. Tealeaf is particularly effective at tracking KPIs of customer behavior and unanticipated events such as unexpected outcomes, unexpected error messages or unexpected behaviors.

Here are my recommended best practices for monitoring your customer experience KPIs:

1. Work with your entire ebusiness team to define appropriate customer experience KPIs for different organizations and groups. You should limit the number of KPIs that any one group must track. Keep in mind that not everyone will look at every KPI.
2. Once you determine what is appropriate, you can assign owners to track each one and take action if they deviate from their norms. Norms will be dependent on the KPI, but you should define what is expected and how to identify spikes and significant changes.
3. Establish an easy way for each and every team member who is responsible for KPIs to monitor them. You may want to set up dashboards and define a standard frequency for responsible parties to do visually monitoring. Better yet, set up alerts so that people are immediately notified of changes. Both dashboards and alerts are standard features of a customer experience management tool like Tealeaf.
4. Roll-up customer experience KPIs to report to management. Management should not look at individual KPIs for unexpected outcomes, but they should care about an overall KPI for site user experience. You might want to create scorecards that roll up individual KPIs and assign a grade in each major category. This can be much more valuable to management than tracking very basic customer experience metrics like page performance.
5. Investigate all changes in KPIs. When a KPI goes out of its historical norm, the assigned owner should take action immediately, performing customer behavior analysis until the cause of the change becomes clear.

The most important best practice for customer experience KPIs is to track them; too many ebusinesses do not because they don’t know how to capture the information (view a video on how and why Tealeaf captures all data). Once you take this first step, you’ll be able to see the value of this important customer experience management best practice.

-- John Dawes, Vice President, Product Management