I’ve been out of the ad/mar tech industry for nearly 6 years, however I’m still a fan of authors like Avinash Kaushik, so much so that I subscribe to his newsletter and find his insights to be cogent, relevant, and generally fun to read.
The post TMAI #427: Increase Velocity: Convert “Things” Into Metrics left an impression on me, especially how it relates to measuring inputs & outputs throughout a customer journey to measure success or failure of an initiative.
In that newsletter above Avinash solicited thoughts from his readers about journey metrics. Here’s what I shared..
As mentioned in your article, moving one metric at the cost of another is not success. Often times there are overarching company goals, like revenue, but individual teams have their own goals. For example…
- Marketing teams may be goaled on new customer acquisition volume based on their GTM strategy and targeting efficacy/efficiency.
- Product teams may be goaled on product/feature adoption that validate their approach to solving a problem or delivering value
- Engineering teams may be goaled on the quality of their code as evidenced by uptime, lack of bugs, and speed to resolution when things do go awry
- Customer Success teams may be goaled on support satisfaction scores, reducing support costs, and increasing self resolution & containment.
Here are some of my ideas when it comes to customer journey metrics…
- % of acquired customers that completed first time use of a specific action (onboarding, get to know me flows, completed job).
- Layering the duration of time between being acquired and completing these steps can also be a measure of urgency or desire from the customer, as well informing how critical the service is to their business, or to infer the ease of the process to get up and running in a relatively short period of time.
- Input metrics like Customer Effort Score that provide insight into how easy specific jobs were.
- At different stages in the customer journey you can measure different things on a scale of 1-5. Generally speaking, 1 being not agree at all, 5 being strongly agree. For example, “you made it easy for me to make the choice to sign up“, you made it easy for me to get started“, “you made it easy for me to realize the value in that feature“.
- These surveys would be placed strategically and after completion of the task (not during a flow) to increase the confidence in the input. You wouldn’t ask these questions all the time to a customer, rather focus on the area with the most friction/challenges.
- For example, if we get feedback back customers feel like marketing over promised and the product under delivered, then we just validated an issue that can be iterated on and remeasured.
- % of cohorts that attached additional services/upgraded/downgraded their subscription.
- For a given time period we should know based on some initial attributes the change in their relationship with our service.
- For example, in Q1 we acquired X new customers, 60% were bronze subscribers, 20% were silver, 20% were gold. After 6 months, of those new Q1 Bronze customers, how many of them are still around? Upgraded to silver? Upgraded to Gold?
As a final thought, as customers’ needs and expectations evolve it’s imperative that teams partner cross functionally to better understand not just where customers are today, but where they are heading. Beloved brands have this mentality at their core. They don’t just meet expectations, they define what awesome looks and feels like for all products & services that a customer uses.