Measuring the customer experience can be most enigmatic. Perhaps the most difficult part is knowing where to start.  The consumer’s experience is varied and multi-faceted which emphasizes a broad view of the various aspect to be assessed. It’s important to determine your goals, choose a method and collect the data you will use to make improvements for future consumers. Here are 15 ways to collect crucial data to help you learn more about your customer and ways you can better connect with them.

The Real Effect

Customer Satisfaction Level: A Likert scale is a simple, but effective measure for customer satisfaction. Questions can range from overall satisfaction to lower level satisfaction points about the purchasing or service experience.  It can also include a variety of attributes such as how they felt about the speed, quality or cost.

Attitude Toward Brand:   Branding surveys measure attraction, connotation and recollection associated with the brand.

Customer Loyalty: Analyzing the repeat purchase rate can offer information about how likely a consumer is to follow through with a subsequent purchase.

Usability

Usability Test: A simple usability test can reveal how simple or complicated it is to complete tasks on websites, applications or products. Check out Usertesting.com or Ethnio.

Quality of Website: Surveying recent site visitors provide metrics on the level of trust, loyalty, usability and appearance of a website.

Site or App Efficiency: Determine how quickly consumers can find what they are looking for and how long it takes for them to take action. Use the System Usability Scale (SUS) which is a survey that measures the perceived ease of a website, app, software or hardware.

Customer Qualities

Lifetime Value: A single purchase does not represent the lifetime value a customer may offer. Calculate customer acquisition and maintenance cost per customer and subtract the revenue they represent including the duration and frequency of their purchases to determine the longevity of value.

Consumer Expectations: A quantitative survey can reveal if the customer’s outcome matched expectations. Since this is an influencer of customer retention, conduct the survey or study with two independent groups. This will ensure accurate results.

Consumer Habits: A task analysis lets customers choose preferred features and those they are most likely to use on an application or website. This is easy to design and analyze.

Services and Features

Important Features: Find out which features drive a consumer to action. Use a single optimized variable such as customer satisfaction or loyalty to focus on.

Feature Value: A conjoint analysis can provide the value of features as well as assist in developing ideal combinations of key features.

Response Time:  Customer satisfaction and loyalty are often influenced by actions like call-hold time, delivery times and page speed times. Using sample or real-time transactions, this data can be collected and assessed. Remember that what matters is how long the consumer expects an action might take.

Effectiveness

SERPs: Consumers rely on search engine results so it’s important to ensure the displayed results are reliable and effective. Periodically test the accuracy and clarity of search results.

Conversion Rates: A/B testing is useful for determining conversions.

Metric Reliability: Using a combination of metrics can offer a wide but consistent range of results.