{"id":240,"date":"2014-11-17T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/measuringu.com\/five-step-cux\/"},"modified":"2021-08-12T09:21:08","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T15:21:08","slug":"five-step-cux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/measuringu.com\/five-step-cux\/","title":{"rendered":"5-Steps for Getting Started Measuring the Customer Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"
Most companies have more bug lists and requests for product features than they can realistically address.<\/p>\n
In an earlier post, I present ways to help you prioritize those features<\/a>; now let’s figure out where to start.<\/p>\n This post describes an approach that works in many situations, beginning with a survey of your customers or prospects, or a representative set thereof, with the following objectives:<\/p>\n Have a representative set of your customers and\/or prospects take a short survey. Use software from MeasuringU<\/a>, SurveyAnalytics<\/a>, or Survey Monkey<\/a> that enables conditionals and randomized tasks.<\/p>\n In the first part of the survey, have participants rate their attitudes toward a few overall product or company metrics, such as:<\/p>\n Loyalty<\/b>: The Net Promoter Score<\/a> or likelihood to repurchase. You can get more detailed metrics by asking about attitudes toward support, delivery, or the sales process, but keep it short\u2014don’t overload the participants early with too many questions. All you need at this stage is an assessment of how well customers’ expectations are being met; you’ll have the opportunity later to go into more detail.<\/p>\n Software and websites are subject to feature creep, which can eventually undermine your objective\u2014which is to draw customers to your product or your site\u2014and your customers’ objective\u2014which is to accomplish tasks and goals easily and quickly. Using information from feature lists, support logs, contextual inquires, interviews, and your own product experience, come up with an exhaustive list of the tasks your product or site enables your customers to do. Consider including tasks that are not yet enabled by the software.<\/p>\n Present these tasks in one survey, in randomized order, using customer-centered, rather than company-internal, language.<\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n – For products with hundreds or thousands of tasks, group the tasks. If you’re testing something like accounting software (QuickBooks), for example, list the top tasks in the Accounts Payable section, Reports Section, Account Registers, or Payroll. You can also sort tasks by granularity; high-level, such as creating a 1099, to low-level, such as computing taxes for a vendor’s 1099.<\/p>\n – You can live with a little redundancy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Have your customers pick the tasks<\/a> they most want to accomplish. Customers won’t be able to read every single task but will instead scan the list and look for the things that come to mind when they think about functional areas (like reports or payroll). Allow participants to select only 3-5 tasks\u2014we want to identify the critical few tasks that your website or product should do well, and we want to ignore, for the purposes of this survey, the trivial many tasks.<\/p>\n Once customers have selected what’s important for them, have the survey software “pipe in” the tasks they selected on subsequent pages. This keeps the customers again focused only on what’s most important and reduces the effort required of the participants.<\/p>\n Have the customers rate how satisfied they are with the product or website’s ability to deliver on those top tasks selected. You can keep it generic or more specific \u2014or both\u2014to rate usability. Again, keep it short to prevent drop out. Using a more generic measure like satisfaction enables you to capture issues like latency (slow loading pages) or quality (broken links, reports that don’t work, etc.) as well as usability. But this higher-level satisfaction rating makes it harder to pinpoint what affects satisfaction. Ask participants to describe briefly why they rate a task low.<\/p>\n While these surveys aren’t intended to diagnose problems, they can be an easy source for collecting low-hanging fruit; if customers’ expectations are not being met, you want to know. Once the data is collected, identify the top tasks and their average satisfaction ratings. You will see the classic Pareto distribution<\/a> showing a few tasks will account for the majority of votes from customers.<\/p>\n Using the key customer variables (step 1 from above, for example, we selected overall satisfaction, loyalty, and usability), identify the areas with the biggest impact on attitudes. Participants’ open-ended comments often identify the main causes of their pain and are an easy place to start.<\/p>\n\n
1. Measure Customer Attitudes<\/h2>\n
\nUsability<\/b>: A measure like SUS<\/a>, SUPR-Q<\/a>, or even a single question about the product’s ease of use.
\nSatisfaction<\/b>: How satisfied customers are with the product, the value they receive and the reliability and quality of the product.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n2. Determine the Top Tasks<\/h2>\n
3. Evaluate Customers’ Satisfaction with Those Top Tasks<\/h2>\n
4. Analyze the Key Drivers<\/h2>\n