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How do you measure customer experience?

Customer Experience is perhaps the hottest trend in digital marketing. Many of my clients have titles such as VP of CX or Director of CX–and they take their jobs very seriously. They want to dramatically improve the experience for customers. But how do you measure whether their experience is improving?

It’s not always possible to know what customers are trying to do–their task–but we spend less time trying than we should. We are especially negligent when it comes to site search. Your search results page is likely one of the most popular pages on your site, but how do you measure whether it is succeeding or not? Most companies don’t. It’s absolutely possible to measure site search as a customer experience, by examining whether searches get results, whether those results get clicks, and whether searchers stay on those clicked pages–those qualities define a successful search.

But we don’t do a great job on measuring other experiences, either. We look at clicks and we do some A/B testing. But our definitions of conversions are all over the map. Precious few have standard task definitions that help evaluate task completion in a standard way across the board.

Using standard ways of measuring customer experience is the very first step to improvement. Not only does it allow you to make changes and evaluate their impact in a data-driven way, but our increasing reliance on machine learning and other AI techniques demands high quality standardized outcome data so that models have enough data to draw the right conclusions.

How are you measuring your customer experience?

Mike Moran

Mike Moran is a Converseon, an AI powered consumer intelligence technology and consulting firm. He is also a senior strategist for SoloSegment, a marketing automation software solutions and services firm. Mike also served as a member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO. Mike spent 30 years at IBM, rising to Distinguished Engineer, an executive-level technical position. Mike held various roles in his IBM career, including eight years at IBM’s customer-facing website, ibm.com, most recently as the Manager of ibm.com Web Experience, where he led 65 information architects, web designers, webmasters, programmers, and technical architects around the world. Mike's newest book is Outside-In Marketing with world-renowned author James Mathewson. He is co-author of the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (with fellow search marketing expert Bill Hunt), now in its Third Edition. Mike is also the author of the acclaimed internet marketing book, Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, named one of best business books of 2007 by the Miami Herald. Mike founded and writes for Biznology® and writes regularly for other blogs. In addition to Mike’s broad technical background, he holds an Advanced Certificate in Market Management Practice from the Royal UK Charter Institute of Marketing and is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He also teaches at Rutgers Business School. He was a Senior Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research and is now a Senior Fellow of The Conference Board. A Certified Speaking Professional, Mike regularly makes speaking appearances. Mike’s previous appearances include keynote speaking appearances worldwide

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