Customer feedback is not enough

Greg Adams at Dynatrace explains why we need to look beyond user feedback to optimise digital experiences

  

In the digital age, the adage that the customer is king holds true more than ever. Just one poor experience with a brand can turn customers away for good. Nearly two-thirds of consumers will sever a relationship with a business given poor customer experience, according to Microsoft.

 

To mitigate this risk, many organisations check in with their customers occasionally, using measures such as customer satisfaction or Net Promoter Score (NPS). But the value of these scores has faced criticism, as they rely on customers’ feedback when solicited. They don’t provide enough insight to help organisations understand how customer sentiment affects their bottom line or how to proactively improve outcomes.

 

What organisations really need is to move away from relying on these relatively basic measures of customer satisfaction and adopt a more mature approach that enables them to continuously optimise the user experience.

 

NPS 3.0 – it’s not one measurement to rule them all

More than two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies rely on NPS (net promoter score), asking the simple question, ‘On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us?’ to take the pulse of customer satisfaction. But critics are quick to note that NPS cannot identify how much returning customers or referrals contribute to revenue; nor can it provide truly actionable insights.

 

It is merely an indicator of customer sentiment captured at a single moment in time. It is not an ongoing assessment of customer experience, or a gauge that identifies where organisations should focus their resources to improve outcomes for the business.

 

To address these criticisms, NPS recently unveiled its third iteration, introducing a new measurement to draw a direct link between customer sentiment, acquisition, and revenue growth. However, this new measurement still doesn’t provide digital experience managers with any insight on how they can improve customer loyalty, such as identifying where pain points exist in the user journey.

 

The outside-in view

To understand the business impact of customer experience, organisations need to move from relying solely on basic measures such as NPS. Rather they should continuously monitor their user journeys from end to end.

 

Viewing an experience from the user’s perspective—also known as the ‘outside-in approach’— gives organisations much better insight into the factors that influence customer behaviour and sentiment. Digital experience managers can then better understand the problems facing their customers, and optimise user journeys more effectively, by working on areas that will increase conversions and boost loyalty.

 

Gaining this visibility starts with real user monitoring (RUM), which allows teams to observe customer journeys in real time. RUM enables them to instantly know when digital experiences go wrong and, if part of a full-stack observability solution, how to resolve them quickly.

 

RUM can also reveal factors that would previously have been a blind spot for digital experience managers, such as whether a user’s device, internet provider, or even location can create unpredictable weak points in their journey.

 

These insights can then be used to guide their spending and resources, so managers avoid wasting time and money working on features or optimizations that have little impact on conversion rates, and instead focus on the areas that deliver value to their bottom line.

 

Going deeper into the user journey

Another essential of outside-in monitoring is session replay technology. While RUM focuses on quantitative measurement of user journeys, session replay capabilities provide a video-like replay of individual user sessions from the user’s perspective, to reveal where usability can be improved.

 

For example, teams can see if customers are being confused by simple user interface design issues such as page layout, or display errors that appear on their screen at certain stages of a transaction. They can then improve those aspects of the user journey, so they don’t affect future customers.

 

Session replay technology also boosts collaboration by creating an easily consumable single source of digital truth on how a user makes a transaction. Both DevOps and business teams can then use this information to work together on how journeys can be optimised to improve conversion rates and boost customer spend in the future.

 

Finally, organisations can further enhance this approach by using synthetic monitoring capabilities to predict issues before they arise for real users. Synthetic monitoring, also called synthetic testing, uses scripts to generate simulated user behaviour to emulate the paths users might take when engaging with an application. 

 

For example, DevOps teams can explore load testing scenarios to identify whether a sudden increase in traffic might cause a new application to fail or emulate different types of customer journeys to see if page response times are affected by certain device types, user locations, or internet service providers.

 

The ability to identify these factors enables digital experience managers to pre-empt issues before they affect users and proactively improve their services. This helps to boost customer loyalty, as it ensures users receive a consistent, high-quality experience, without needing to give feedback.

 

A fresh perspective

Understanding the end-to-end user journey is the best way to measure how customer satisfaction affects the bottom line. Asking for feedback is not enough. Teams need to have actionable insights on how pain points can be eliminated, where usability can be improved, and where resources should be prioritised.

 

Continuously monitoring real-time user journeys and predicting future problems before they occur can give them this insight and help them make more effective decisions that drive better business outcomes.

 

---

 

Greg Adams is Regional Vice President, UK&I, Dynatrace

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com