Evidence-based customer KPIs

Continuing from last time, we perhaps agree that the customer experience may be used to help achieve customer objectives (reduce churn, up/cross-sell, acquisition etc.) And further, that the KPIs one might wish to set (a) go beyond just ‘raising NPS’ and (b) probably differ for different customer objectives.

And then we get stuck. It’s fine to hypothesise different customer experience KPIs for different customer objectives but it’s all guesswork. It’s no better than the standard ‘raise NPS and good things will happen’ nonsense. What’s to be done?

One could look for a body of evidence around how different experiential KPIs (satisfaction, adoration, trust etc.) have been shown to ‘drive’ (skirting around the cause-and-effect debate) desired behaviours. But there’s not much out there (at least that I can find) and where it exists it’s specific to a brand and sector. Not the sort of thing to put much faith in when we’re interested in the right metrics for our unique business.

What would you do if this were a question of media spend and resultant customer behaviours? You’d try to link exposure data to customer data, right? And then you’d commission a little econometric modelling.

And what happens with the same problem in customer experience? We focus on NPS, cross our fingers and hope for the best.

So why not take the same evidence-based approach to customer experience? Seriously, why not?