Establish Customer Struggle KPIs, Part II

By Wendy Roth, Education Manager —

In my earlier post on establishing customer struggle Key Performance Indicator (KPI) scorecards, I discussed some of the ways you can determine what kinds of struggle are important to track on your mobile or desktop web site. Once you know what kinds of struggles you want to monitor, building a KPI scorecard to monitor them in Tealeaf is surprisingly easy.

A KPI scorecard, for example, can measure the percentage of visitors who struggle performing a basic activity, and lets you monitor if that struggle is greater than the thresholds you set for that activity. Let's look at a sample KPI report:



For each KPI, you must first determine what the base activity is, and then the events that indicate struggle. The base activity depends on what you'd like to measure, which varies by industry and website purpose. In this example, I am monitoring what percentage of my customers experience a struggle during the checkout process. My base activity, therefore, is a count of all the visitors who started the checkout process, counted just once per visitor.

In my example, I would take the following activities as indicators of struggle: If a customer visited the Help section after starting checkout, didn't receive a purchase confirmation message, or started checkout more than three times. Again, these indicators are counted only once per visitor in this example; conceivably, if you double or triple counted the indicator for each base activity you could have more than a hundred percent of your visitors experiencing struggle.

Once configured, the KPI report automatically calculates what percentage of those who proceed to checkout have experienced the indicated struggles. It also compares that struggle to a comparable time period, and shows whether the percentage of customers experiencing that struggle has gone up or down so you can evaluate changes over time.

Here's an example of a KPI Report where you can set thresholds to measure a site activity:



The KPI report also lets you set goals for yourself; you determine what is gets a grade of A and what deserves an F. In this case, the goal is 5% or fewer of those who start the checkout process should experience a struggle. I'd recommend that you be a bit more generous with your site when you first start to measure struggle. Based on the thresholds set above, usability issues are getting an F! As the web development team works to reduce these percentages, you can adjust the grades to be stricter.

Once adjusted, the KPI scorecard is a quick and easy way to see if you are meeting your own goals. If you normally get Bs but get an F during a certain week, you know there's big trouble. It's easy to drill down into the KPI scorecard to see representative sessions so you can quickly analyze what's gone south.

My final advice is that although it's easy to create KPI scorecards, be judicious and selective at first. Focusing on too many goals isn't quite as bad as having no goals at all, but it does make it difficult to focus on what really counts. And there's nothing so satisfying as achieving the goals you've set, so start with a few and expand from there. Have fun!