Use this Launchpad as a starting place to understand what an XM metrics program is, why it’s important, and how you can start taking action to build a stronger program. Then explore the key resources included at the bottom of the page to expand your knowledge of this essential XM topic.
The Fundamentals
Experience Management (XM) metrics programs track a comprehensive set of measurements to help organizations understand the quality of the experiences they deliver to customers, employees, partners, suppliers, and prospects.
This set of measurements will include both operational metrics, which are generated by a company’s day-to-day business operations, as well as experience metrics, which measure how people think and feel about their experiences with a company (such as Net Promoter Score, satisfaction, employee engagement, product feedback, or brand perception).
The set of XM metrics organizations can track cuts across a number of different categories, including:
Behavioral Observations
These metrics track the concrete actions people take, such as whether a supplier downloads CAD files, whether a customer uses a self-service application, or whether an employee completes a training course. These behavioral metrics are especially valuable when the organization combines them with other experience metrics.
Relationship Attitudes
These metrics track how people feel about a particular entity and include measurements such as a customer’s likelihood to recommend, an employee’s plans to look for a new job, a partner’s willingness to sell your products, or a prospect’s opinion on the social responsibility of your brand. Attitudinal metrics are often critical for understanding and measuring the health of the relationships people have with your company and are therefore vital for driving organizational priorities.
Interaction Perceptions
These metrics track how people feel about individual experiences and include measurements like an employee’s satisfaction with an IT help desk call, a customer’s view of the helpfulness of a contact center agent, and feedback from partners about the ease of use for ordering on a new portal. Tracking Interaction Perception metrics will help an organization identify specific pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Journey Perceptions
These metrics track how people feel once they’ve finished a set of activities associated with achieving a specific goal. Examples of Journey Perception metrics include measurements like an employee’s satisfaction with the onboarding process, a customer’s feelings about her system upgrade, or a partner’s feedback on how easy it is to complete a new configuration process. Journey Perception metrics can yield particularly rich insights as they track what people truly care about – achieving their goals.
A strong XM metrics program is an essential component of any company’s XM efforts as metrics allow an organization to systematically measure the quality of the experiences it delivers to the people who interact with it. More importantly, these measurements provide insights that help the company spot improvement opportunities, prioritize its investments, track its XM progress, and raise awareness of its XM efforts across the organization.
However, to enjoy all these benefits, a company must use its XM metrics to drive meaningful action across the business. Simply defining and capturing feedback scores or distributing detailed monthly dashboards isn’t enough – leaders and employees must be using these metrics to inform their day-to-day decisions and behaviors.
Tips for Taking Action
So how should a company go about creating a strong, actionable XM metrics program? Here are some tips for taking action:
Select a Core XM Metric
Select a primary, relationship-level metric (such as NPS, satisfaction, engagement, or trust) that measures the overall quality of peoples’ experiences with your organization. This Core XM Metric will act as a North Star, aligning Experience Management efforts across the entire organization around a single common goal.
Identify key drivers
Not every interaction or person is going to affect the Core XM Metric equally. To determine where to focus improvement efforts, find the moments, journeys, touchpoints, and segments that most significantly impact people’s attitudes towards your business. Then establish metrics to measure your company’s performance around those key drivers, and hold individuals and teams across the company accountable for improving those experiences.
Set aggressive, but realistic, goals
While you may want to drive improvements quickly, people will disengage with a metric if it’s tied to a goal that they perceive as unattainable. It’s fair to have long-term “stretch goals,” but the organization needs to believe that near-term objectives, at least, are possible. It’s important when you’re setting goals to identify different targets for different regions and business areas as measurements can vary dramatically across countries, departments, branch locations, and so on.
Focus on taking action
Instead of obsessing over the specific numbers, companies must instead focus on taking actions based on the insights. To help the organization use metrics to drive action, executives should continually ask and answer two questions about all the metrics the company collects: “What have we learned?” and “What improvements are we making?”
Selectively tie metrics to compensation
To embed XM metrics in the company’s culture, it may be necessary to monetarily compensate employees based on improvements in measurements. It’s important to handle compensation very thoughtfully, however, as poorly designed compensation programs may inadvertently drive the wrong employee behaviors, like gaming the system to receive higher scores.
Customize metrics for different audiences
Not all XM metrics will be equally meaningful for all employees. Tailor the distribution of XM metrics by audience. These different segments should not only see a customized view of metrics, but they should also be trained on which role-specific behaviors they need to demonstrate to improve both the Core XM Metric as well as their personal key driver metrics.
