As Peter Drucker said: “What gets measured, gets managed.” It makes sense to argue that if you want to manage customer experience, you would do well to measure it. Some remember the more popular version of this statement saying “What gets measured gets done”. Therein lies a subtle trap. It’s called surrogation.
Wikipaedia defines surrogation as “a psychological phenomenon in which the measure of a construct of interest evolves to replace the construct itself”. Another definition: Surrogation is the behavioural tendency we all have as human beings to substitute or confuse the item being measured with the metric being used. Quite simply, it is the act of substituting one thing for another.
The Harvard Business Review published an excellent article late last year asking the provocative question: “Are metrics undermining your business?” Here Tayler and Harris explain that leaders often confuse their strategy with its numbers. For example, we decide to measure our customer experience strategy using a particular metric such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction survey). Because the metrics are hard observable numbers while the strategy is conceptual and potentially fuzzy, managers tend to latch onto the numbers as a substitute for the strategy. They reckon that if we achieve great scores in the numbers, it means we’re achieving the strategy.
This is the trap of surrogation. We might be convinced that great CSAT scores equates to great customer experience, but this is not always or entirely true. It is possible to obtain high customer satisfaction results in a survey and at the same time poorly deliver on the full scope of our customer experience strategy. Many factors can significantly skew survey results such as timing, priming, sampling and/or low response rates. We’d be happy to share with you (at no charge) how to avoid these types of distortions of results.
For now, let’s say that there’s no bias in our CSAT results. Yet, it would still be a problem if leaders treat these results as if they represent the full picture of the quality of our customer experience our company is providing. Why? Because customer experience is a day-to-day, multi-dimensional business issue.
Therefore, to get a full picture, to avoid the risk of surrogation, we need metrics that:
- Reflect day-to-day interactions, transactions and activities for or by the customer
- Measure each dimension of the strategy, operations, systems, processes and resources involved in customer experience delivery
Don’t get me wrong, I love customer research, but surveys have their flaws so it would be risky to rely on them to reveal the whole picture. Some companies do annual customer surveys. These give executives one perspective of the customer experience at a snapshot in time – not the full picture. On the other hand, some companies do daily surveys every time a customer calls the contact centre, initiates some administrative transaction, accesses the website or logs a complaint. Typically, such intense ‘voice of the customer’ methodologies have low participation rates. Such low rates are telling us something: In my view, these surveys irritate the ‘living daylights’ out of many customers. Ironically, the very thing the company is trying to improve (customer experience) is being harmed by the approach the company is using to measure it. This is precisely one of the consequences of surrogation, and there are others.
Ideally we want to have a good number of well thought-through customer metrics that serve as reliable indicators of each aspect of the customer experience. This doesn’t mean having numerous customer surveys nor does it mean eliminating all of them. It means we make use of a well-rounded set of internal and external metrics, most of which can be tracked on a monthly basis. Added together, a robust set of metrics will tell more of the full story about the type of experience customers are having in their dealings with our products, our services, our communications, our people.
Like other leading CX consulting firms, Brilliance helps executives figure out the right customer experience metrics for their organisation.
Furthermore, we provide the Brilliance Customer Measurement Tool for companies that are committed to effectively measuring customer experience. This software application is available on annual subscription and is fully customisable to your CX objectives, catering for many different types of metrics across any number of products and/or divisions. Apart from the very reasonable price-point, the beauty of this tool is the way it so simply and elegantly provides a dashboard for executives giving them a single CX number to track – a single number that represents the full spectrum of metrics relevant to your organisation.
Read further or give us a call if you’d like to find out more.