Chapter 6

The use of metrics in marketing enables you to track your progress, measure your successes, and address your failures. It’s the only way to build a scientific, closed-loop process that’s based on data at all stages. It’s all about segmenting users based on the behavioral data you collect, such as the pages they visit and the sequence in which they do it.

Importance of Measuring Persona and User Journey

Having well-developed customer personas is great, but they need to be fully based on data to ensure you aren’t making educated guesses. To understand the customer journey accurately and create effectively, targeted communications your customers require, you need to create both the persona and the journey maps based on real insights. These should showcase individual customer experiences from beginning to end with omnichannel measurements that provide person-level insights.

Understanding the NPS® and CSAT

Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) are metrics used in customer experience programs. Developed in 2003 by Bain and Company, the NPS is used by millions of businesses to track how their customers view them. NPS measures the loyalty of customers to the brand, using responses to just one question:

“How likely is it that you would recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague?”

Respondents answer by giving a rating between 0 (negative) and 10 (positive) and are grouped into one of three categories based on their rating:

Promoters: These are people who respond with a rating of 9 or 10 and are highly loyal customers.

Passives: These are customers who give a score of 7 or 8 and are typically satisfied with the company but aren’t enthusiastic enough to be considered promoters.

Detractors: Anyone who responds with a 6 or lower is unhappy and unlikely to buy from the company again. They might even discourage others from using the firm.

The customer satisfaction score is similar to NPS, except it measures the buyer’s satisfaction with the product or service purchased. The question used for CSAT is something similar to:

“How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [goods/service] you received?”

Respondents use a scale of 1 to 5 to rate their purchase, with 5 being the most positive. Only responses of 4 and 5 are considered satisfied and used to predict customer retention. The score is expressed as a percentage of the total. CSAT provides insight into the customer’s mindset at the time of the survey but doesn’t go far toward measuring their overall relationship with the company. The NPS measurement, however, provides a broader view of the brand or product and focuses on the customer’s intention, rather than overall satisfaction.

Ways To Measure and Analyze the Results

To collect and understand the insights available from personas and the user journey accurately, you’ll need to use some sort of data analytics platform that can deliver omnichannel measurements. Given the importance of measuring the customer journey and the investment in resources it can involve, it’s vital to do it efficiently. Some ways to do this are:

Align your content with each point in the customer journey

With a well-developed persona and tools in place to follow your customer through their journey, you should be able to identify how your user’s needs will change over time. Armed with this information, you can adjust your content and overall messaging to meet the customer where they are in their journey. Keep the same messaging throughout and you run the risk of becoming irrelevant to your customer or having them outgrow your product or service.

Choose the right channel to solicit feedback

Customers are pressed for time, and they don’t want to spend it providing feedback to you. The quicker and easier your feedback process is, the more likely you are to get it. One way to make it quick and easy for customers is to use channels they access often, so it’s no effort for them to provide it. When a caller has held on for more than 10 minutes waiting to speak to a customer service agent, sending them to an automated survey after the call is just another time suck. Rather, choose a channel for getting feedback that your customer journey map identified as having a positive vibe associated with it. This might be social media, email, or text message. Make sure your outreach happens at the most important moment and is hassle-free for the customer to provide it. Your customer journey analytics can help identify the most important times to contact customers, and marketing automation can make sure you only ask for it at those times.

Remember that although feedback can be incredibly useful, it doesn’t replace the user’s actual behavior, which is a far superior tool for segmentation and persona-building.

Focus on your most valuable customers

Your customers don’t all behave the same, nor do they have the same impact on your revenue. It’s important to make sure your measurement activities focus on the most valuable of your customers. With customer journey analytics, you can do things like:

Find out which customers had the most unresolved complaints — a macro segment.

Determine which of this group had called customer service before discontinuing their business — a micro-segment.

Work out the customer experience metrics for each segment and track how improvements affect them over time.

This allows you to use your customer journey analytics to highlight behavioral segments that have the highest profitability and growth potential.

Track what’s happening in real-time

If you’re using a customer journey analytics tool, you’ll have access to custom dashboards that can help you monitor what’s happening at both journey level and overall level in real-time. This gives you a status check on critical insights, as well as discovering the high-impact micro-journeys that might be happening.

Define your metric priorities

The customer journey analytics you collect will help you to identify the most important metrics to follow. Once you’ve analyzed your customers’ behavior, you might discover there are certain questions you can’t answer because you aren’t capturing the metrics. At the same time, you’ll be able to tell whether the money and time you’re spending on measuring, analyzing, and reporting is delivering worthwhile results.

Marketers can then use the insights to create precise maps that identify positive and negative experiences across the customer journey. These journey maps also help to connect customer experience with the behaviors and expectations of individual consumers. Finally, they highlight areas across the customer journey where marketers can optimize their efforts.

Click here for more information on how to measure the user journey with content groupings, WordPress and Google Tag Manager.

What To Do With the Insights

When you collect and analyze customer journey data, you gather insights that can help you deliver a more personalized experience, improve your product or service to meet customer needs better, and enhance your processes for stronger customer service. For example, if the data shows customers with a common question don’t return for a second purchase, it could be because they had difficulty understanding the product’s use the first time.

This insight allows you to create an automated message for all buyers that arrives in their inbox soon after purchase telling them the answer to the question before they ask it. Customer journey insights are helpful in spotting problems with your product or sales process, so you can continuously improve the quality, build long-term customer relationships and reduce customer churn.

Chapter 6

The use of metrics in marketing enables you to track your progress, measure your successes, and address your failures. It’s the only way to build a scientific, closed-loop process that’s based on data at all stages. It’s all about segmenting users based on the behavioral data you collect, such as the pages they visit and the sequence in which they do it.

Importance of Measuring Persona and User Journey

Having well-developed customer personas is great, but they need to be fully based on data to ensure you aren’t making educated guesses. To understand the customer journey accurately and create effectively, targeted communications your customers require, you need to create both the persona and the journey maps based on real insights. These should showcase individual customer experiences from beginning to end with omnichannel measurements that provide person-level insights.

Understanding the NPS® and CSAT

Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) are metrics used in customer experience programs. Developed in 2003 by Bain and Company, the NPS is used by millions of businesses to track how their customers view them. NPS measures the loyalty of customers to the brand, using responses to just one question:

“How likely is it that you would recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague?”

Respondents answer by giving a rating between 0 (negative) and 10 (positive) and are grouped into one of three categories based on their rating:

Promoters: These are people who respond with a rating of 9 or 10 and are highly loyal customers.

Passives: These are customers who give a score of 7 or 8 and are typically satisfied with the company but aren’t enthusiastic enough to be considered promoters.

Detractors: Anyone who responds with a 6 or lower is unhappy and unlikely to buy from the company again. They might even discourage others from using the firm.

The customer satisfaction score is similar to NPS, except it measures the buyer’s satisfaction with the product or service purchased. The question used for CSAT is something similar to:

“How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [goods/service] you received?”

Respondents use a scale of 1 to 5 to rate their purchase, with 5 being the most positive. Only responses of 4 and 5 are considered satisfied and used to predict customer retention. The score is expressed as a percentage of the total. CSAT provides insight into the customer’s mindset at the time of the survey but doesn’t go far toward measuring their overall relationship with the company. The NPS measurement, however, provides a broader view of the brand or product and focuses on the customer’s intention, rather than overall satisfaction.

Ways To Measure and Analyze the Results

To collect and understand the insights available from personas and the user journey accurately, you’ll need to use some sort of data analytics platform that can deliver omnichannel measurements. Given the importance of measuring the customer journey and the investment in resources it can involve, it’s vital to do it efficiently. Some ways to do this are:

Align your content with each point in the customer journey

With a well-developed persona and tools in place to follow your customer through their journey, you should be able to identify how your user’s needs will change over time. Armed with this information, you can adjust your content and overall messaging to meet the customer where they are in their journey. Keep the same messaging throughout and you run the risk of becoming irrelevant to your customer or having them outgrow your product or service.

Choose the right channel to solicit feedback

Customers are pressed for time, and they don’t want to spend it providing feedback to you. The quicker and easier your feedback process is, the more likely you are to get it. One way to make it quick and easy for customers is to use channels they access often, so it’s no effort for them to provide it. When a caller has held on for more than 10 minutes waiting to speak to a customer service agent, sending them to an automated survey after the call is just another time suck. Rather, choose a channel for getting feedback that your customer journey map identified as having a positive vibe associated with it. This might be social media, email, or text message. Make sure your outreach happens at the most important moment and is hassle-free for the customer to provide it. Your customer journey analytics can help identify the most important times to contact customers, and marketing automation can make sure you only ask for it at those times.

Remember that although feedback can be incredibly useful, it doesn’t replace the user’s actual behavior, which is a far superior tool for segmentation and persona-building.

Focus on your most valuable customers

Your customers don’t all behave the same, nor do they have the same impact on your revenue. It’s important to make sure your measurement activities focus on the most valuable of your customers. With customer journey analytics, you can do things like:

Find out which customers had the most unresolved complaints — a macro segment.

Determine which of this group had called customer service before discontinuing their business — a micro-segment.

Work out the customer experience metrics for each segment and track how improvements affect them over time.

This allows you to use your customer journey analytics to highlight behavioral segments that have the highest profitability and growth potential.

Track what’s happening in real-time

If you’re using a customer journey analytics tool, you’ll have access to custom dashboards that can help you monitor what’s happening at both journey level and overall level in real-time. This gives you a status check on critical insights, as well as discovering the high-impact micro-journeys that might be happening.

Define your metric priorities

The customer journey analytics you collect will help you to identify the most important metrics to follow. Once you’ve analyzed your customers’ behavior, you might discover there are certain questions you can’t answer because you aren’t capturing the metrics. At the same time, you’ll be able to tell whether the money and time you’re spending on measuring, analyzing, and reporting is delivering worthwhile results.

Marketers can then use the insights to create precise maps that identify positive and negative experiences across the customer journey. These journey maps also help to connect customer experience with the behaviors and expectations of individual consumers. Finally, they highlight areas across the customer journey where marketers can optimize their efforts.

Click here for more information on how to measure the user journey with content groupings, WordPress and Google Tag Manager.

What To Do With the Insights

When you collect and analyze customer journey data, you gather insights that can help you deliver a more personalized experience, improve your product or service to meet customer needs better, and enhance your processes for stronger customer service. For example, if the data shows customers with a common question don’t return for a second purchase, it could be because they had difficulty understanding the product’s use the first time.

This insight allows you to create an automated message for all buyers that arrives in their inbox soon after purchase telling them the answer to the question before they ask it. Customer journey insights are helpful in spotting problems with your product or sales process, so you can continuously improve the quality, build long-term customer relationships and reduce customer churn.

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