Common sense says your customers’ digital experiences are closely tied to overall customer satisfaction. But new metrics can now show the effect of a substandard digital experience on the bottom line. The Digital Experience Metrics (DX Metrics) framework, allows companies to quantify the financial impact of their digital experiences and benchmark against industry peers.
Takeaways
- Qualtrics, a leading supplier of experience-management technology, has developed the DX Metrics framework and integrated it into its customer experience management software. It focuses on answering questions that measure three key areas of digital experience:
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- Emotion – measured by customer satisfaction
- Effort – measured by how easy or difficult it was to complete a task
- Success – measured by the completion of the task
- Research from Qualtrics shows that increasing a customer’s satisfaction score can increase the amount they spend by up to 37%. Reducing the effort required to complete a task online can lead to a 23% increase in the amount they spend.
Customer satisfaction
- Qualtrics works to measure customer satisfaction with 1,300 brands globally across industries ranging from healthcare and financial services to hospitality and media. While online channels are inherently transactional, it says customers are more likely to come back when the experience is effortless and evokes a positive emotion.
- The Qualtrics XM Institute conducted research into customer satisfaction scores in the fourth quarter of three consecutive years – 2019, 2020, 2021. In study, 50,000 US respondents aged 18 and older were asked to rate website experiences with 150 companies in 15 commerce-focused industries.
- In the 2021 Q4 benchmark study, analysis from respondents selecting “make a purchase” as their primary or secondary purpose for visiting a site was used to create the financial impact metrics.
Industry comparisons
- The retail industry was found to perform best with digital experience gaps likely to result in losses of just 3.33%. At the other end of the spectrum, automotive, healthcare and hospitality were judged to be likely to suffer the greatest losses from poor digital experiences:
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- Automotive – digital channels was 17.93%
- Health insurance – 13.78%
- Travel – 10.43%
- In analysing the data, researchers believe lost revenue could be recovered by improving overall user experience, the addition of personalised content and streamlining customer journeys. Brad Anderson, president of products and services at Qualtrics explained that creating great experiences, even in traditionally impersonal digital channels, is a critical differentiator for every business today. He said:
Digital Experience Metrics connect customer sentiment to financial impact, helping organizations understand how investing in better digital experiences based on individual feedback can impact their bottom line.
Core Web Vitals
While Qualtrics DX framework looks more deeply at customer satisfaction factors, for publishers not using customer experience management software, Google’s core web vitals provide a solid foundation for improving digital experiences.
Google’s Core Web Vitals are a set of user-focused metrics designed to measure a page’s “health” in terms of providing a smooth and seamless user experience. They also look at three key metrics to score user experience – how quickly content loads, how quickly the browser loading a page responds to user input, and how unstable the content is as it loads in the browser.
Publishers can check their own core web vitals in several ways, including a report in Search Console that helps site owners evaluate pages across their site.
