„What gets measured, gets done!“ – everyone in business has heard this sentence one or the other time. According to an interesting article, the quote was truncated and actually should read, “What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so.” How do we select the right data to avoid a ‘Tyranny of Metrics’? To solve an existing issue or improve a situation, we must first understand the status quo and figure out the underlying problem. What’s more important to be improved than the heart of our business, our customer's experience?
Understanding Customer Journeys
A customer journey is the complete experience a customer has while interacting with a company or brand, from the initial point of contact to the final purchase and beyond. Typical stages in a customer journey are Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Usage, Advocacy, and Re-purchase.
Mapping, analyzing and managing customer journeys matters because it helps organizations optimize customer experience, improve satisfaction, and foster loyalty.
But what is it that makes a customer journey insightful for companies? Many businesses agree that metrics can be an essential component in analyzing customer journeys, optimizing customer experiences, and ultimately driving business success.
What are key metrics in Customer Journeys?
There are numerous possibly relevant metrics depending on where your customer/employee/citizen (or else) is in the customer journey.
Awareness
In this stage one of the most important metrics is the traffic source. It lets you identify where your audience comes from (organic search, social media, referrals). Others that will serve you well are reach and impressions: Measuring the extent of your audience reach.
Consideration
When your customers are already taking your business into consideration you will have other metrics that are of interest to you. On the one hand you will look into Engagement metrics, such as bounce rate, time spent on site, and pages per session. On the other hand you will have Lead Generation metrics, such as number of sign-ups, form submissions, and inquiries.
Purchase
Here the actual revenue generation gets measured. Among others, Conversion Rates, Buyer Rates and average order value of a customer are to be investigated. Depending on your product or service range this can vary widely. Find out what adds value to your business planning and fits your purpose!
Usage
The actual usage of a product is the basis for advocacy and retention. Measuring if customers achieve their goals (jobs-to-be-done), error rates, customer engagement, complaints, pain points, contact reasons, and customer effort scores are among the most favorite metrics in this stage. However, in particular, in the usage stage, qualitative factors are at least similarly interesting to monitor. To really understand why customers contact customer support, quantitative factors just show that there is a problem, but are often not sufficient to really understand a pain point.
Advocacy
A frequent and popular KPI for the advocacy stage is Net Promoter Score (NPS). It illustrates the likelihood of customers recommending your business to others. We believe that there are much better ways to illustrate this stage, such as CSat – Customer Satisfaction. It focuses on the overall customer happiness, and not only on the recommendation readiness of a customer. While being primarily quantitative, CSat scores often include qualitative comments that provide context to the ratings.
Another important metric is the quality and quantity of customer Reviews and Testimonials, the thorough processing, evaluating and analyzing is a great and often underestimated way for organizations to get valuable feedback.
Re-purchase
The retention stage will likely be well explained by Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), or Repeat Purchase Rate. CLV illustrates the total worth of a customer over the lifespan of their relationship with the organization, whereas the Repeat Purchase Rate depicts the frequency of repeat purchases of the average customer.
How can we measure and analyze metrics for journey maps?
There’s a wide number of tools and technologies available, depending on your business and purpose, e.g. Google Analytics as one of the most common and popular web analytics tools. Furthermore, there are numerous CRM systems or customer feedback tools.
When it comes to data collection, there are a couple of best practices that we recommend following through with. Firstly, ensure data accuracy and consistency, otherwise it’s difficult to compare, get actionable insights and derive decisions from it.
Furthermore, there are numerous benefits connected to using real-time analytics and data monitoring.
Use triangulation by combining multiple metrics and qualitative insights, such as pain points, contact reasons, or opportunities.
You can analyze your data in various ways, in multiple steps. Often, it’s wise to start with segmentation, e.g. breaking down data by customer segments. Identify and understand trends and patterns that develop over time.
All this data can be fed into your customer journey map, leading to better insights and more informed, reliable decision-making.
Actionable Insights and Optimization
These steps help you to identify Pain Points, using metrics to pinpoint areas for improvement will help your business. Furthermore, it’s possible to use this data for personalization: tailor experiences based on customer data, your users will appreciate it. A/B Testing lets you experiment with different strategies to optimize performance, use the newly acquired knowledge from your journey to decide which options to use.
And last but not least, improve continuously. Iterate based on feedback and performance metrics. Regularly check your maps, automatically feed data from various sources in your journey map to always have an up-to-date data hub of your customer’s experience.
Conclusion and strategic implication
Metrics are crucial to derive informed decisions from journey maps. We recommend using the Journey Performance Indicator (JPI) as a communication tool. The Journey Performance Indicator states the health of a journey map, taking both qualitative and quantitative data into consideration. It originates from KPIs and qualitative factors, such as voice of the customer. Combining quantitative with qualitative insights through Mixed-Methods Analysis in your Journey Map ensures a comprehensive and holistic view of the overall customer experience. The deeper, more nuanced understanding of your customer journey map helps you to make informed decisions to improve satisfaction and loyalty.
