You must start with an objective in mind. What are you seeking to solve for? That answer is going to be different depending on who you speak to within the organization. Seek out your key users, think about how they understand the business, and talk to them in their language. You might talk to an IT director who just wants to understand what customers think about their page load speed, so they know whether to budget more for server space. You might talk to a marketer who wants to know which buttons create enhanced calls to action. Working with several stakeholders at the organization will help you get a clear understanding of all the things you could learn through digital listening.
And then what’s the path to make that happen? We use a three-phased approach. We typically start with a “track and diagnose” phase where we stand up some intercepts on your website and determine the most common or problematic journeys. We essentially identify what we need to fix within this digital property. Then we pivot to something called a journey-based deep dive. Now that we understand which are the common and problematic journeys, how do we fix them? We send out very targeted, specific, quick hit surveys with two to five questions to identify the action steps and how we go about fixing a certain digital journey. For example: Why did you abandon your cart? What was most difficult about signing up for our newsletter?
It is 3 Strategic Digital Metrics that must be implemented. These have emerged as the primary Key Performance Indicators for digital interactions:
- SUCCESS EFFORT EMOTION: Was the customer able to accomplish what they came to do?
- EFFORT: How easy or difficult was it to accomplish their task?
- EMOTION: How did it make them feel?
Since the digital experience is monitored in real time, negative experiences can be stopped in their tracks. For example, we can look at dwell time and trigger an intercept after someone’s been looking for a long time at how to go about solving their issue. And we can serve a piece of content that says, “Do you need more help?” We’re taking an inferred signal to help support that experience in real time. That can be done in any number of different ways: product, product delivery, or service and support delivery. The third phase as an organization matures is to move into what we call the activate and transform phase. We’re already delivering the information we gather through our listening posts to our dev teams to improve the experience itself. But how can we take that a step deeper by integrating some of this zero-party data and help? This is where we start thinking about how to personalize this experience and serve content that gets them to a service channel, support channel, a different kind of product, or a recommender. It’s about creating a multi-path set of interactions that guides customers to where both parties (the customer and the company) want the journey to go. It really is the next step in the final evolution of the digital customer experience journey.
Is there a ROI in digital interactions?
Self-service is key to cost reduction, and digital channels are oftentimes highly optimized for it. So, we can leverage listening posts to understand what people want self-service for and build experiences and journeys to match that. Also, optimizing based on zero-party data helps website visitors move further down the conversion funnel to purchase your products.
The value of digital customer experience listening is that it allows us to capture massive sums of data while the interaction is happening. You’re not just asking how a transaction went. You also have all the connected information, the operational data that’s occurring in real time. This allows us to connect this information across the enterprise and personalize the experience, creating those positive and emotive experiences that produce loyalty outcomes and ultimately drive revenue and business objectives as well.
