{PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Customer Experience Analytics

In this episode, Katie and Chris review the field of customer experience analytics. What are customer experience analytics, and what comprises their components? From simple data points like returning users to the website to Net Promoter Scores, join them on a walk through the customer journey and how to measure it at every step.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn
This is in your insights, the trust insights podcast.

In this episode of in your insights today we are talking about customer experience analytics, measuring the customer experience in so many different ways. And then what do we do with the information. So Katie customer experience analytics was mentioned heavily in Jay Baer his new book talk triggers which we reviewed a couple months ago. And it came out, it came with a very adorable stuffed alpaca. And some of the KPIs mentioned in this book. Things like Net Promoter Score change, offer redemption, customer growth, customer behavior, but you’ve got a lot of work explaining the customer journey, particularly as it pertains pertains to predictive analytics. Those few big numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. We are talking a little bit about some of the stuff that we always want to look at the stages of that customer journey.

Katie Robbert
Yeah, so first of all, I didn’t get now.

So I can’t say that it was cute. Second, yeah, you’re right. There’s a lot more data that’s available to marketers about the customer experience. And I think that, that sort of, like, let’s start there. You know, when we talk about the customer experience, we’re really talking about the buyers journey and the customer journey. And together, those make the full, you know, 360 customer experience. And so, within all of those phases, it’s there’s multiple phases, you have a lot of different touch points and data points to collect about the experience that your customers going through.

So that way that you can continue to refine and improve the experience to create more retention. And I think that that’s ultimately the goal of what marketers are after is what data leads to more customer retention. What experience leads my customers to keep coming back and buying more things from me, and to stay loyal?

Christopher Penn
Yep. So that really begs the question, what marketers tend to focus on the first half right, awareness, consideration, evaluation purchase. But when we talk about retention, we’re really talking about the second half. So we’re talking the purchase experience itself, satisfaction, the loyalty and then the evangelism. So what are some of the things that you look for, especially like evangelism? What is things you look for, that would say, hey, our customers are so happy, they’re telling the rest of the world about us?

Katie Robbert
Well, this is where you start to get into metrics that are a little bit more difficult for marketers to collect and analyze. And that some of the qualitative data such as customer reviews, customer support information,

if you’re asking for if you don’t have feedback form setup on your website, then you might be missing the mark, such as, you know, rate my website, or did you find everything that you were looking for? Or, you know, cart, abandon quick surveys of, you know, why are you leaving this thing here? Why don’t you want to buy it from me, please, please, please buy this thing. So, a little bit of an exaggeration, but really not we all of us marketers are desperate.

But I think that, you know, once you start to get into more of that qualitative market research data, such as, you know, why did you sign up in the first place really, that why data? Why are you doing this behavior? Not so much the what happened that quantitative? I hit the website, I did a conversion, but where if that qualitative of the, why did you choose this? Why did you choose blue instead of green? What could we have done to improve your experience those that that’s the type of data that often gets left behind or left on the cutting room floor, as they say,

Christopher Penn
what about it’s something that companies used to do all the time, and something consumers used to do all the time, but it’s feels like it’s falling by the wayside. Things like warranty registration and stuff, people saying, like, hey, I want to I bought this device from you, I want to register the warranty is that something that companies just kind of have left, but you know, on the cutting room floor, as it were, I think

Katie Robbert
it depends on what type of service or product they’re offering. If they’re offering tech, or like phones, there’s this, there’s this movement now, where all of the tech that we have is almost kind of meant to be disposable. So what’s the point of having any sort of a long term warranty. But if you look at something like a washing machine, or a dishwasher, those are the types of products that you would expect to have some kind of a warranty for Now, that said, when you register for the warranty,

so what you know, you put your name, you register for your serial number, and then in the circumstance that it might tend to break you call you call the company that services the thing that’s not really a customer experience where you can retain people, it’s just more of a I hope my stuff doesn’t break.

Christopher Penn
But it sounds like from what I hearing, it could be an opportunity to retain people if as part of the registration like, Hey, here’s some cool new ways to use your new frying pan or some recipes. That sounds like there’s a way to provide value even at that point in the customer lifecycle. If a company actually cared,

Katie Robbert
you’re absolutely right. And I think some companies do you do that. And I think that the frying pan is a really good example of that, where, you know, they have that supplementary, okay, you thought this one thing, if you sign up, you know, for your warranty, or register for our community, you get access to and unlock, you know, 30 recipes a month, or, you know, you can ask questions of other people who have bought products similar to you. So, it’s really sort of keeping those people within that ecosystem of that product, so that they can continue to, you know, learn more about it, do more with it. And then, to your point, become more of an evangelist and be the one who’s talking about it, and spreading the word so that other people get on board. So they tell their friends, they tell their family, I remember sitting at a barbecue in my own, you know, backyard and someone was like, one of my husband’s friends was adamant that we had to get an instant pot, we had to get it. He loved it. He was like, signed up on Facebook. He was in the cold and he was such it was, you know, his support was it paying him to do this. But he was such a fan. And he was such an evangelist of it, that ultimately he was able to convince us that you know, what, our lives have been completely empty until we get this thing and it was such You know, it you know, it’s when you look back at so silly. But like he was such an evangelist that he was able to convince us that you know what, we need one too.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, another really interesting example where it’s not only a cost savings, but it’s also that evangelist is the Salesforce support system called trailhead. I don’t know how Salesforce fit, crack the nut on this, but they did they successfully convinced all their users to support each other in a, in a positive gamify environment. We have, you have trail masters, and, you know, cool badges and they get like silly hats and stuff. But it’s a big thing where they have a huge digital community, and people are supporting each other writing code for each other, like doing free work for each other. So Salesforce is like, well, support problems. Oh, yeah, that’s, I mean, that is definitely the unicorn. But that’s, that’s the goal. Exactly. And it provides now is it provide customer satisfaction, but really provides that customer delight. So I mean, we’ve, we even have that twist, very tiny degree with our analytics for marketers slack group, which you can sign up with that Trusted Sites, such as life analytics for marketers were trying to provide a support community for each other. But one of the great things about that is that all these digital communities that you create, all have analytics. And as part of the customer experience, if you if you’re seeing no participation in your community, maybe you have a customer experience problem.

Katie Robbert
So I guess that sort of brings us back to the original question of the types of metrics that marketers should be looking out for, with their customer experience. So to your point, you know, I think a lot of us, most of us, as marketers focus heavily on the buyers journey. And, you know, once they convert, once they’ve been sold something, once they buy something, we tend to forget about them in terms of that customer retention, where can marketers start to extract and find some of their own customer journey, customer experience data? And what what should we be doing with it, you know,

Christopher Penn
it’s funny, when you think about it, from the point of purchase onward, your data quality should be pristine, because you control that data, right? You don’t control Facebook stats. So every market is trying to like squeeze insights out of Facebook, like, you know, reading blood from a stone, but once somebody in your CRM or your era, p system or whatever, at that point, you know, who they are and stuff. So I would say you prioritize in terms of, of moving up the customer experience ladder from, you know, take care of the basic stuff, like how many warranty claims do you have? How many customer support calls do you get? How many complaints do you get? And so on the show the basics, and then you have your loyalties, how often do people keep coming back? How often do the weekly newsletters after they bought something? How much do they come after the come back to website? One of the things I think is so silly is that marketers ignore or don’t track customers in the marketing automation systems to see like, hey, this customer who’s paid for something in the past,

this score keeps going up. Let’s makes keep making stuff for them to make them happier. And then I really like what you got to say, which is on the evangelism side, reviews are essential. How many? What are they saying conversation, social mentions from customers. If you don’t have a Twitter list, for example of your current customers can be privately you want to share it. But if you’re not paying attention to what your customers are saying, when they’re not talking to you, you are missing an opportunity to build new and interesting things for them. And to the question of what do you do with all this data? It is a gold mine. It is a literal gold mine. Because if you’re doing your analytics, well, you should have, you know, the standard our FM data, at recency, frequency, and monetary value of your customer. You should be using stats or data science or machine learning to say, Okay, what we know who the most valuable customers are based on all this customer experience, day that we have. What is an indicator of customer value? What is it? What, who are happiest customers? Who are most powerful evangelists? How does that relate to revenue? And can we find those unicorns? Like you’re saying, we find these unicorns who are happy customers, and crazy evangelists and, and find more of them,

Katie Robbert
do you think that some of this could be solved by simply just asking customers for review or for or for some feedback? And do you think that we just, we as a whole don’t do enough of that. Like, we just don’t ask the customers what they’re thinking

Christopher Penn
we owe you 100%? Do I ask people enough often enough, and even when we do we do stupid stuff with it. One of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen as a hotel chain, this hotel chain has a survey process, you send out a survey asking for your thing, and it asks you questions like how comfortable room blah, blah, blah, and everything you’d expect to hotel expense at the end at auto triggers says, Please leave us a review on TripAdvisor.

There’s no logic in the system none no one thought the suit if you’re unhappy it should not pop up the TripAdvisor like if you rated the hotel under an eight for anything that should be a send it to management for review, fix what’s wrong. And only after you fix the customer experience. I had this experience recently my wife stayed at a at one of their branches and had a terrible experience because the was so noisy with all these traveling athletic teams and the hotels like leave us a review. I’m like your hotel socks is spelled with a screaming teenagers, 24 hours a day in the front desk, refused to do anything. And now that’s their one star review on TripAdvisor. So even when we’re collecting this data, we’re not using it intelligently.

Katie Robbert
I think that’s a really good point about some of that tailoring and some of that branching logic. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. There’s a lot of really simple systems that allow you to do something like that. There’s a lot if you have a WordPress site, there’s a lot of plugins that are built in that you can use survey monkey is a really great example of a type of survey that allows branching logic. So do you think that people just don’t want to know the bad? Or do you think that they’re really honestly just not thinking, Oh, hey, we should probably ask our customers for reviews instead of his hoping that it happens organically. You know,

Christopher Penn
I I think it’s a bit of both. I think there’s some organizations that are not data savvy, like oh, it’s a lot lot not do that. Cuz we don’t know how, but I 100% believe that there are some organizations where they absolutely want to have their heads in the sand, I heard a great quote it said, a leader who refuses to be questioned, always makes questionable decisions. And, you know, so if you are surrounded by Yes, men, if you don’t want to hear what the customer has to say, you can make some pretty bad choices, because you just kind of assume that you know better than all those customers in the collective brainpower. I mean, that’s what killed Sears Sears has had this crazy CEOs, like, I’m going to make us to a data company, and we’re going to, you know, collect customer data, you know, and, and sell it. And, like, none of your business is like washers, and and he has driven the company to bankruptcy multiple times, because he has this crazy idea. And it made the customer spends so much worse, like to interact with CEOs at all, you have to feel like a 14 page profile so we could resell your day, you couldn’t claim a warranty without filling out a information that he could then go and resell and people like, I’m just gonna go to Home Depot instead.

Katie Robbert
Well, so that’s a really good point, too, is that so when you were asking earlier about, you know, having customer sign up for warranties and keeping them re engaged, I think you sort of have that flip side where companies are trying too hard to collect every bit of information and making that customer experience so unwieldy, that that’s the thing that turns people off to being to signing up for something or buying something from them. So it’s, you know, you have to be able to find that balance between collecting nothing, and collecting everything, which is a really vague statement. And I recognize that, but it’s going to be a different response for every company in terms of what they need. And I,

Christopher Penn
this is, you know, let’s cue the broken record. But a big part of that is, is planning up front and figure out what

Unknown
new

Christopher Penn
to figure out what you’re capable of doing. Like, if you don’t have any machine learning capabilities, don’t collect 500 fields a day,

Katie Robbert
that’s absolutely right. You know, or if you don’t have a corral of interns who are willing to work 12 hours a day for, you know, a basket oranges, then probably don’t collect all that data, either. You can just, you know, it’s not that I’ve ever done that. So,

Christopher Penn
yeah, in terms of customer experience, analytics, it really is a very broad term, because it encompasses so much of the customer journey, but think about it from the perspective of, of what you have access to what you care about, what you know, what you’re able to feel like, if you Seth Godin has a great statement, if you’re not going to change what you eat, or how much you exercise, don’t get on the scale, right? The same is true for any form of analytics, especially customer experience. If you are not our honor the warranty don’t offer it.

Katie Robbert
Yeah, no, I think that that’s exactly right. And, you know, I am as a consumer, I get really frustrated when I take the time to fill out some sort of a feedback form. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve done my job as consumer to give some actionable things of like, I wasn’t happy with this, or It’d be great if you change this, and then it kind of goes into the abyss and nothing happens. So I think that there’s a responsibility on the company side, where if you’re collecting this information, then do something with it, or acknowledge to your customers, hey, we’ve seen your thing, because we know you took time out of your busy day to actually give us feedback and be a part of our community. So I think that, you know, if you’re going to figure out those ways to collect the data, you also need to have that, you know, feedback loop with the customer of, Hey, we got your data. And that’s one of those things that continues to build that trust and loyalty of Okay, as a customer, I was heard. So that’s, you know, a great stepping stone,

Christopher Penn
I would agree, except that say, The country has to do something. I mean, it’s stuff there’s nothing quite like filling a feedback form saying, oh, we’re really sorry about that experience. sure where to go do it. Nothing. But we’re really sorry.

Katie Robbert
Well, that’s what that’s what I’m saying is, you know, you have to acknowledge that you got the feedback, but then you also have to be willing to do something with it. So to your point, if you don’t have the infrastructure set up to do something, then you’re right. Absolutely don’t ask because you can’t do anything with it anyway. And you’ll continue to create that ill will with your customer base and probably lose more customers than you intended.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, I mean, we’ve had a debate internally, we’ve thought about building software as a product, like, do we want to do support? No, no. So if we’re not going to honor the support side, then we shouldn’t put something up for sale or, you know, it comes with a absolutely no support is included, right? That’s not very satisfying, either.

Katie Robbert
No. And I think that that’s one of those things where, you know, you break it, you bought it? Okay, well, that’s not really very helpful. So yeah, I think that there’s a lot of untapped potential within the customer experience data that marketers should really reach into. Because the other thing is, even if they’re not responsible for customer retention, knowing what keeps loyal customers, what creates those evangelists will help you create smarter campaigns within your buyers journey because you’ll know the types of folks that you want to be attracting because those are your ideal customers. So there’s a lot of data that you could be using to even inform your awareness stage and some of your earlier stages.

Christopher Penn
Yeah, and I would say as a as an immediate takeaway that’s easy for any marketers you implement today if you have any kind of customer support or warranty page or anything like that make sure your analytics is tracking those pages and then create a sort of a separate view in your analytics of hey here’s the known pages that only post purchase customers go to and track the track that data like a real simple thing to do would be to have a warranty registration page track the analytics on it and it warranty claims page track the analytics on that and that number alone which should tell you like number of claims divided by the number of warranty registrations should help you understand how good your product is or isn’t because if there’s no claims and a lot of registrations great people are happy if you got more claims, and

it’s gone really wrong with your product. You know,

Katie Robbert
and I think to that to just don’t be afraid to ask people and check in with them once in a while, like, Hey, how’s it going? Hey, do you like the thing? Are you so happy? What can we be doing better?

Christopher Penn
Yep. The best companies that I’ve ever worked for have all had customer advisory boards where they sit, you know, they pay for customers to fly in for a half a day, whatever. I just sit down, say, so what are we doing wrong?

Katie Robbert
Yeah, I’m point earlier,

Christopher Penn
you have to be willing to hear bad news.

Katie Robbert
Yeah, and that’s half the battle. So, you know, that all comes to planning that all comes with, you know, thinking about the people and the process and the platforms and you could hear us talk about that for hours on end. But we will do do that to you this week. So, Chris, any parting words on the customer experience

Christopher Penn
measure what you’re willing to manage?

Katie Robbert
All right. And so that does it for us this week. So you can find us at trust insights.ai if you’re interested in joining the slack community that we mentioned that is trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. It is a free slack community. You know, we hope to see you there and we welcome your questions. So until next time, Chris.

Christopher Penn
Until next time, please subscribe to the YouTube channel newsletter and we’ll talk to you soon. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to me your insights, the trust insights podcast, please ask a co worker or colleague to follow our show on Google podcasts. Apple podcast wherever you listen to your shows. Got a question like us to answer Watson help solving your data and analytics challenges visit us at www dot trust insights.ai today.

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