They have an objective value that must be achieved over time. When the goal is reached, improvement factors usually fall into disuse or become an indicator of health with a healthy range. Personalized metrics make us feel good, while more is always better, but they don't correlate with better business performance or greater customer satisfaction. Metaphorically, vanity metrics are the corporate equivalent of measuring waist or bicep sizes.
Subjective metrics demonstrate a customer's perceptions of what's happening and the effect this has on their overall experience and intention. They are usually measured immediately after a transaction, such as a purchase, customer service inquiry, or other interaction with a brand. Its goal is to capture the customer's feelings and impressions as close as possible to “in the moment”. Subjective metrics are relatively easy to measure, with many simple survey tools available to do so.
While they're not the only indicator of customer satisfaction, subjective metrics include extremely useful information that's easily obtainable. However, they should not be used as the only measure of success because they can often be an immediate emotional reaction to an experience. By combining them with more objective metrics, you get a more complete view. The actions that customers take as a result of their experience and perceptions are defined as behavioral metrics.
Unlike subjective metrics, these are objective and are observed by integrated or proprietary reporting platforms in the channels with which customers interact. They can range from digital platforms such as email communications to other offline systems, such as call center tracking. Continuing once again with our example of traveling. There are two relevant measures that we have mentioned: distance and time.
Combining these measurements gives us a metric, but the measurements themselves are essentially blind data, meaning that they don't make any statements about what they are measuring, other than the measurement itself. If we say that a person traveled thirty miles, all we can say is the distance they traveled. We would need the additional measure of time to know if they are going fast or slow. A diverse set of customer experience metrics will allow your organization to better understand where critical issues are, where there is room for improvement, and where you are currently successful.
Response time is a very common metric in companies that describes the time it takes to complete a task. Using these four types of metrics in a comprehensive measurement system will give you the best possible view of the performance of your customer experience. For example, business metrics would measure the number of new car buyers over a year or the number of qualified marketing leads (MQL) that convert into qualified sales leads (SQL) per quarter. It can be very easy to become obsessed with certain metrics and measures that, while far from useless, are very small in the grand scheme of things.
Like operational metrics, business metrics can often span disciplines and departments, but are incredibly valuable to an organization. The most important metric to focus on for success this year may be completely different from the metric that was most significant last year. The most obvious difference between metrics and measures is that measurements are a fundamental unit that in itself provides very little information. Whether it's indicators such as website traffic or social media engagement, or conversion statistics on sales or registrations, analyzing just one type of data doesn't provide a complete picture of the customer experience.
Analyzing operational metrics can often be the best way to discover cracks in a business process or disconnects between different teams, since they usually cover disciplines and departments. Behavioral metrics are relatively easy to measure, although they are often measured in an aggregated way and not on a client-by-customer basis. .
