How To Measure Customer Delight

At any point, but hopefully at the beginning, it’s important that a product team sets objective metrics to measure success of a new feature, process, system or entire product offering. When we say KPIs, we think data, analytics, and all sorts of quantitative measures. But when we introduce qualitative goals like “customer delight” into our design thinking process, product teams stop in their tracks and exclaim, “It’s so subjective, how can we possibly measure feelings and emotions??”

I recently received the question:

It is clear how to measure KPIs like number of people starting journeys per month. Are there any ways for measuring delight? I can’t think of any except measuring engagement.

It really is a great question! Measuring subjective emotions is far harder than quantitative analytics. But my client asking the question is taking her first steps to recognizing that design research and traditional quantitative market research can and should co-exist. While the current startup product development atmosphere emphasizes quantitative and analytical data-based decision making, we cannot afford to overlook design research’s ability to define KPIs.

This is how you can take a given emotion and derive objective metrics to gain insight into whether your customers are feeling a target emotion with your product. For the sake of this thought experiment, let’s consider a project where we are redoing a self-service help center for a large financial institution.

First, pick an emotion: Joy, Interest, Serenity, Hope, Gratitude, Kindness, Surprise, Cheerfulness, Confidence, Admiration, Enthusiasm, Euphoria, Satisfaction, Pride, Contentment, Inspiration, Amusement, Enjoyment, Awe and Love.

• Let’s pick Confident, as in, a customer feels confident that they have successfully self-serviced through the Help Center on their own.

Second, think of behaviors that would indicate a person is [EMOTION]

• If a person is immediately Confident that their issue has been resolved:
• Hopefully, this person will not select “Contact Us” to locate the company’s phone number or access live chat.
• In addition to a successful completion, this person will not go search again on the same topic.
• This person will hopefully exit the Help Center by moving elsewhere on the site, or by logging out altogether.

Third,  frame these behaviors in terms of measurable actions or trends we may see in our analytics:

• A decline in how many customers select Contact Us to find phone and Live Chat options after visiting the Help Center.
• An increase in completed tasks with success.
• User Flow/Tracking that shows clicks from the success page going elsewhere, outside the Help Center

Here are some other emotions, measured through behavioral analytics:

• If customers are happy with the experience, they are likely to return the next time they have a problem.
• We can measure how often customers click through to the Help Center and have successful completion rates.
• …measure how many unique services customers engage with and complete over a given time period.
• If customers are interested in the content and education we provide, does that mean they would spend more time on the page? Let’s measure that as well.

Your turn – what other measurements can we use to gauge positive feelings?