Measuring Customer Experience and Customer Experience Design
Relationships with customers are less transactional than ever. What happens before, during, and after the purchase becomes part of the experience, and today’s customers and consumers are often happy to provide feedback. Measuring customer experience can be tricky, but it can also be highly instructive.
From your website to delivery, advertising, and social media, all the way through customer service, customers are interacting with your brand in many ways outside of the purchase transaction. Understanding and measuring customer experiences helps our clients make improvements, adjust messaging and processes, and even create new opportunities to engage their customers.
Ways We Measure Experience to Generate Insights
How do you measure customer experience or any experience for that matter? The easy answer is “ask them” – today’s customers are likely to answer (and be glad you asked). But sometimes the deeper insights come from other less conspicuous methods. We humans don’t have perfect recall, and our responses are often influenced by many other factors. That’s why CLARITY Research & Strategy incorporates many forms of observation into our research, for example:
Ethnography
Measuring customer experience by studying customers in their own environment interacting with your product, service, or competitive set. They usually know we’re there.
Mystery Shopping
As the name implies, this is observational fieldwork in which the subject is not aware of the observation. It is the ultimate behavior-based study.
Social Listening
Capturing interactions and engagement that happens on social channels, evaluating patterns, and measuring customer experience.
User Reviews
Unsolicited customer feedback on actual products or services, both about our clients and their competitors
Informing Customer Experience Design
Once you have the insights, what’s next? We equip our clients and partners with the understanding and clarity they need to inform customer experience design. That means creating the experiences your customers want and need to have along the purchase path and beyond. Customer experience design extends from communications through shopper marketing and all the way to service or repeat purchase. It includes engagement in social and sometimes live interaction. It’s also where more of the organization has a chance to make an impact, and where the voice of the customer can be most important.
