I am a member of Lean Startup Circle in San Francisco. It’s a decentralized grassroots organization of Lean Startup practitioners all over the world. We come together to share tips, tricks, and stories about our successes and failures building companies. At a recent event, Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups and a well-known blogger, spoke, and her publisher, O’Reilly Media, generously provided copies of her book to those attending.
The sub-title of Laura’s book is Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design. While great user experiences are essential for products today, Laura understands that designing a great user experience can be a lengthy and expensive process. The book is intended “to show you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.” I recently finished Laura’s book and was impressed with the section on metrics.
Focus on Your Goals and Not on the Metrics
Laura writes, “Sometimes people get so focused on the metrics that they forget that the metrics are just shorthand for real-world business goals. They can end up trying so hard to move a particular metric that they sacrifice the actual goal.” We see this often with Cyara customers who can become so focused on a specific metric, say self-service adoption, that they fail to recognize other issues in their customer experience environment that can be much more critical; for example poor audio quality.
Do You Know Your CX Goals?
Using the Cyara Platform, Cyara tests and monitors the customer experience environments of our customers. We collect all types of metrics; for example, information on the IVR, agent desktop, chat, email, and attached data. Our domain experts are well informed on which metrics to test for and how to optimize these metrics. Our experts can also tell you which metrics matter may be more critical based on their experience working with multiple customers.
What the Cyara experts don’t know is what matters to your business. Do you know what business goals you are trying to achieve by testing your customer experience? Cyara experts take your business objectives and desired customer experience into consideration with end-to-end testing and monitoring. Putting it simply, it’s better to focus on meeting your business goals and not on the individual metrics.
The CX Fix
Here’s a scenario that illustrates why focusing on metrics may not help you meet your goals. A QA Tester may find that response times are slow for a test step. Should the system be tuned without taking into consideration how this would affect the IVR containment rate? Just because your IVR applications are optimized doesn’t mean that the customer experience is perfect.
Continuing with the scenario, let’s not forget that testing the IVR or PBX isn’t just about having a good customer experience. What about the business goals behind your metrics? Increasing the IVR containment rate comes with a certain cost. If you have a 99% containment IVR rate, then the majority of your customers are self-serviced by a machine, which results in your agents having no human interaction with your customers. Congratulations, you have reduced the cost of agents, but is this good overall for the company?
The Cyara Platform will help you identify areas for improvement that you can investigate. Automated testing does provides a lot of data, but this data always needs to be correlated with your CX strategy and overall business goals. It’s critical to remember that your customer experience is a balanced process that is much more than just individual metrics.
About Cyara
Cyara is the world’s fastest growing provider of an omni-channel customer experience testing and monitoring platform. The single platform is a comprehensive suite that provides coverage for the entire innovation cycle. Installation is non-invasive and very fast. Cyara customers innovate faster and more predictably, saving time and money in the process, and reducing the risk of customer-facing defects.
Regardless of your business objectives, Cyara can help you optimize your customer experience.
