Modernizing Experience Measurement? —?Part 1

Just as many others had started, my business trip began with a tap — my requested Lyft was on its way to take me to the airport. I always enjoy chatting with my driver and this time was no exception. We talked about whether or not this was their full-time job, what other things they did or liked to do when not driving for Lyft. My driver shared how they worked for a company that exported goods. This was mid-February, just as Coronavirus was on the verge of becoming a global pandemic. They shared concerns about how COVID-19 was beginning to interrupt supply chains throughout Asia. Writing this now, in early April, it blows my mind how quickly the impact of the virus became global and certainly warrants another discussion for another day.

As the car reached the curb at my terminal, I was prompted with the standard request to provide feedback. I appreciate that Lyft inquires about things beyond just the driver themselves and wants to know about the overall experience. Was the driver friendly and welcoming, was the vehicle clean and comfortable, did they arrive on time and plan ahead to avoid traffic delays and other potential stresses? It’s a super-easy way for Lyft, and their drivers, to know what’s working well and where they need to focus on improving so I’m always happy to engage in what I truly feel is a two-way dialog. A few quick taps and I was on my way to TSA.

To my surprise, getting through TSA Pre-Check was a breeze this day. Quite a feat for the world’s busiest airport! Another opportunity to provide feedback. A quick tap and on my way once again. 

Strolling the terminal is a favorite pastime of mine and I have a few rituals I carry out before boarding each flight. Grab an oversized snack and bottle of water. Check. Stop in the restroom before boarding the plane. Check. Leave feedback on the restroom upon exiting. Not so check. I truly appreciate that so many makers of experiences - yes, public restrooms are experiences! - want to know what’s working and what’s not so they can make a plan to make it right. But something about a touchscreen located just outside the exit of a very busy restroom is troublesome to me. I have personal limitations when it comes to touching things in public. My mind wonders “aren’t there other ways of collecting this kind of data?” where people wouldn’t have to agonize over touching a screen. Things like utilizing sensors to detect when water overflows or to count the number of people with an alert to facilities that a cleaning is needed after a pre-determined amount have come through. I know what you’re thinking — that only solves part of the equation, not the overall experience of using the restroom. Fair enough. Since most travelers take advantage of free WiFi while in the airport, prompt them with a short survey when they’re signing up for access. Heck, the survey itself can be an experience! There are endless ways to make it fun, engaging and an easy ‘tap’ to capture satisfaction metrics relative to kinds of experiences while in the terminal. Yes, even the restroom. 

We’re living in an experience economy with customer feedback at the heart of how we hope to provide the experience we imagined for them. As an Experience Design professional, I view the process of creating a customer feedback experience as a service design exercise in and of itself with two concurrent goals, 1. get valuable/actionable learnings, and 2. use the request for feedback as an opportunity to engage the user in enjoyable dialog that can be positive and empowering. It appears that in our zeal to put customers at the center of what we design and how we develop that; customer surveys have become the ‘easy answer’ to gathering insights. This risks creating feedback fatigue due overtaxing customers with constant requests. Reflecting on my recent run-in with the restroom touchpad, I would love to take this opportunity to explore how we start to modernize our Experience Measurement mechanism. It all starts with the fundamentals. Simply stated — the success of Experience Measurement begins before we even create the feedback mechanism.

There are four questions I typically like to think through:

1. What are we measuring? This is about measuring a users and a customers experience across products, services and touchpoints.
2. Why are we measuring? We want to measure the experience in order to understand how users and customers feel while interacting with products, services and touchpoints. 
3. Who & when are we measuring? Human, digital, AI Bots, during and immediately after an interaction, after a series of interactions and at different points in the lifecycle.
4. How are we measuring? Surveys, proxies for how customers would typically feel (e.g., a customer shopping weekly at Traders Joe’s), sentiments (Speech & Text).

We’ll start with the ‘What’ in this post and explore each of the remaining questions in more detail in an upcoming post. 

Customer feedback mechanisms are a commonplace these days. You may see it in a restaurant receipt from the dinner you had with your family. The flight you took for your business travel. You may receive an email survey from your car dealership where they changed your oil. And, as we’ve previously discussed, the airport terminal restroom. Most of these are focused, specific interactions you’ve had. In the case of your business flight, the feedback is focused on the time spent inside the plane but not on the check-in process or the time spent waiting in the gate seating area. This is what we’re targeting in the inner most circle named interactions in the image above.

Expanding out to the Journey layer, the flight experience starts the moment you leave your house and doesn’t come to fruition until you are back home; feedback on specific interactions don’t take into account the journey (yes, that pun was intended). I understand that there are multiple companies or brands involved when it comes to travel. Why should one brand care about your entire trip? Let me share another recent experience to illustrate the opportunity. 

I was recently on an international trip with my family that included three legs of travel before we arrived home. When I finished the first leg of travel we found ourselves shutout of the international airport’s waiting area as it was not within 4 hours of our next flight’s departure. I found a lounge where I paid $40 for my family to sleep for a couple of hours before we went back into the international airport’s waiting area. If my flight carrier had designed for the entire journey they would have identified this as an opportunity for improving the customer experience as well as increase their revenue pie (e.g., revenue share with the lounge company and improved my satisfaction towards the carrier). The above mentioned end-to-end experience is represented via the Journey circle in the image above. These individual interactions and the holistic journey experiences have to exude values that customers can recognize and associate with the brand. 

The final level of feedback, represented by the outermost circle labeled Brand in the image above includes measurement, agnostic of a touchpoint interaction or journey experience, at a brand level and can inform how customers & users perceive the brand. This level of experience is slowest to move over time.

The outlined Interaction → Journey → Brand construct can be used to inform an overall measurement program and/or help think through the ‘what’ phase when planning for feedback. However, it’s important to note that these three components of measurement have a lot of interdependencies as individual interactions obviously comprise part of a Journey experience and Journey experiences impact one’s Brand perception. The opposite is true too, as a positive Brand perception can create a halo effect through which one views the Journey experience and/or an interaction. These connected relationships underscore the need to consider collinearity within your measurement program. To-date we have found success utilizing and believe these three interrelated constructs can create meaningful insights that help drive the CX within any organization.