As marketers and digital business owners, we have the unique opportunity of exercising both sides of our brain on a daily basis. By striking that strategic balance between form & function, tech & design, we’re rewarded with happier customers more willing to part with their hard earned money. The analytics tools that leaders in the industry use to accomplish this are increasingly that same special mix of qualitative and quantitative. Let’s take a look at how they’re doing it.
Figure 1: What steps can we take to break down a few silos and capture all the right CX data?
Most of us in marketing live on the left side of the dotted line above. Our world of customer analytics is driven from customer feedback or basic web/mobile/CRM analytics. The right side of the dotted line are the supporting systems behind our apps, of which IT groups monitor with application performance monitoring tools. Using these customer supporting systems in silos provides value, but that value multiplies as you combine and integrate them.
Top digital performers have smerged, borged and grown from singular focused- qualitative or quantitative measurements to real-time, omnichannel, scalable, SaaS-based, all-in-one platforms.
So why aren’t we doing this already?
It ain’t gonna happen overnight. Building a real-time and well-rounded understanding of customer experience comes by building one small success after another. See what you can do about building an internal success story library to force bigger organization changes to support the necessary cultural changes needed to make this happen.
Let’s look at a few examples. Can Google Analytics tell you which line of code on your site is responsible for a poor customer experience? Can monitoring social chatter in Hootsuite tell you if the person complaining is a customer, or validate it’s not PEBCAC? Do Amazon Web Services or GoDaddy availability dashboards tell you if the site is slow? Does A-B testing content or color choices tell you how users felt about their experience?
As marketers and digital business owners, we have a responsibility to know the answers to these questions. We can certainly continue to use these awesome services for what they were designed for, but to become a leader we need an evolution of the qualitative AND the quantitative to capture the real story. Reach across the aisle and see what you can do about solving a few of these.
The CX practices you have in place now aren’t necessarily dying, expectations are increasing!
Cassie Johnson recently addressed the death of customer surveys here. In addition to the best practices she highlights, let’s think about how we can supplement survey data to unlock new insights while removing friction. By definition, feedback programs require a real life human customer to do something for you. Could you have gathered the same feedback from your appstore rating? Could you have scripted a synthetic transaction simulating the same experience without experimenting on paying customers? Your source of truth lies somewhere in between and the cost of collecting it should fall across your business and IT organizations, not the customer. Like I said earlier, reach across the aisle to see how your counterparts are measuring CX and build a new approach with the same tools.