Customer Experience Library - Tip #8 It's About Data, But Only Because It's About PEOPLE

You’ve heard about this thing. This nebulous thing. It’s the next big thing. Data.

Big data.

Real-time data.

Clean data.

Accurate data.

Useful data.

The often referenced, never fully defined, or understood, DATA.

Why is a customer experience designer talking about data.

Very simple.

Data tells us about PEOPLE.

Data can help us quantitatively understand the actions of real human beings and understand what they want, and how we can help them. 

That’s why you need to be attuned to customer experience data.

Now, what metrics could you use to help measure the DELIGHT (or lack thereof) of your customers. Often, direct feedback measures are helpful – customer reviews, surveys, etc. 

These can be helpful – but what other creative ways can you think of to get real data on how well you’re serving your customers. In our experience, we’ve found this follow-up technique extremely helpful and non-threatening - when following-up with a customer (yes we teach you to follow-up post-sale with your customers) we ask what if they need any help or have any questions about their purchase.

Then we listen.

And we categorize any area they articulate where they need help understanding, or any part of the process the found confusing (or helpful).   Keeping track of the positive or negative things they said in categories helps us understand, in an indirect manner, what parts of our experience are DELIGHTFUL and what parts still need work.   

These personal, one on one communications are pure gold for us. However, we understand that sometimes at scale, digital data is more efficient in collecting these sentiments. So, we often rely on digital data that reveals a customer’s actions or intension.  Online behavior data is easiest to obtain in this domain. If you are a brick-and-mortar store, have no fear, you’ll just have to be more diligent and creative. 

For digital tools, consider these metrics (especially by demographic or region):

-Click through rate (on pay per click ads or campaigns)

-Unique Website Visitors

-Session Length

-Conversions

-Cart Abandonment %

-Tools like HotJar allow you to observe user behavior more closely. 

This behavior data will unlock insights into what real PEOPLE value about your product or service. 

Again, this isn’t data for data sake. This is data that tells us about PEOPLE.  It tells us about what they want (or occasionally what they are feeling). 

So when you think data, think PEOPLE.  What does this data tell me about HUMAN needs, desires, or emotions).

Here’s another quick example.  After using HotJar and some Google Analytic data around most frequently viewed pages on our website. We were able to determine that PEOPLE were using our customer portal to view vary specific data about our service. 

They wanted to know if there was anything they needed to FIX.  

Basically they wanted to know what was WRONG and how to address it. 

Everything that was fine got ignored. 

So… what did we do.

We re-organized the site to bring the action items to FIX to the top of the home page and made those items bright red.

Less scrolling.

More customer DELIGHT!

All through data.

Data that told us about PEOPLE.

#customerexperience

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