Customer Experience (CX) – it’s a popular topic right now, analogous to the importance of User Experience (UX) in the world of product development.  And something which I strongly believe is important for a marketing team to get right. So, we all know that getting your Customer Experience great and consistent is important for all of your customers’ touch points but – how on Earth do you measure if it’s working or not? Was it worth the effort?

There’s a great piece I read here recently about the issue of “end-to-end” funnels – basically give up on the idea of a linear funnel where a customer moves through the buyer process from “Awareness” to “Discovery” to “Validation” to “Retention”, measurable through cohort analysis and conversion rates. The reality is that customers interact with your brand in multiple, unstructured, unordered ways at the end of which (hopefully!) they buy your product (aka the “Dark Funnel”). If someone is buying a car how did they end up at that decision? Sure they might have visited VW’s website, but they might also have asked friends, gone on to review sites, read a motoring magazine, asked a question on Twitter, spoken to the sales reps in the showrooms, researched forums – all in a semi-random order, unpredictable and – key – very hard to measure.

I really agree with this – and the suggestion I take from this is: stop worrying about measuring it all and just make great customer experiences. That’s enough – if you’ve made your website great, your social media channels interactive and high quality, your support is top-notch, you respond quickly on forums, you’re friendly and positive at events etc, then belief is enough to justify this “investment”.

But, is that enough – is there any way of measuring the impact of your work? Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one possibility – and it is the sort of thing that can be measured. But from a PDCA perspective (where we’re trying to measure the impact of our work and adjust accordingly), it’s very slow, and let’s be honest, optimistic to think that you’re going to be able to separate out the impact of your marketing work in an NPS score from everything else. What if your company has just released a ton of great product to the market at the same time – what had the impact on NPS? It feels unsatisfactory.

So we need something more immediate. The best I could come up with, and the thing I’m going to try, is “Mystery Shoppers”. It seems obvious but in the world of User Experience what do we do to test the usability of our products? We ask users to try the product out – simple. So why not do the same for your CX? Get five people, at regular intervals to pretend they have a need related to your products – and to go through all the necessary interactions with your brand to buy something. From first Google search, to some forum interaction, maybe a question on Twitter, download a whitepaper (and try to understand it!), follow your Facebook page, phone up support, try to use the product, try to buy it, get follow-on help and so on.

And you could have different types – someone acting as an end-user vs. a corporate buyer. Someone who is totally self-service/won’t speak to anyone vs. someone who wants to sort everything out on the phone. An expert vs. a newbie. A difficult so-and-so vs. a “happy path” customer.

Then of course you can get both qualitative and quantitative data from those people about their “Customer Experiences” – put the numbers on a chart and use PDCA process to see where the problems are (“We’re great if you get us on the phone, but self-service customers are really struggling” or “They’re great once they’re using the product, but it was a mess up to that point”). And you can use the qualitative feedback to know how to act. If a mystery shopper says “I just couldn’t understand from your site what your product actually does“, then may be better explanation? Or better still, a video?

It shouldn’t cost much to implement and the feedback should be invaluable – as long as you then act on it! NB: It’s also important to get people disassociated from your company. Just asking the people in your team, or a regular customer who has loved you for years isn’t enough. You want people who’ve barely heard of you, or haven’t interacted with you for years – proper, independent input is the most valuable, and what you should be seeking.