Design Your Quality of Customer Experience (QCE) Scorecard

Create a Small, Focused Set of Metrics; Measure What Matters to Your Customers

March 24, 2005

What are the best practices in the design of customer experience scorecards? Best-practices leaders don’t content themselves with customer satisfaction and loyalty surveys—(How would you rate this experience? Would you recommend X to a friend or colleague?) They also identify a small set of operational customer metrics to monitor and continuously improve. These customer-centric metrics form the basis for the customer experience Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are used to motivate and focus employees. By measuring the right stuff—what matters most to customers—these companies continually improve the Quality of the Customer Experience(SM) they deliver, reaping rewards in higher customer satisfaction, greater customer loyalty, a larger number of customers and more profits per customer. Learn the 8 Steps to create your own QCE Scorecard.

NETTING IT OUT

What are the best practices in the design of customer experience scorecards? Best practices leaders don’t content themselves with customer satisfaction and loyalty surveys. (How would you rate this experience? Would you recommend X to a friend or colleague?) They also identify a small set of operational customer metrics to monitor and improve continuously. These customer-centric metrics form the basis for the customer experience key performance indicators (KPIs) that are used to motivate and focus employees. By measuring the right stuff—what matters most to customers—these companies continually improve the Quality of the Customer Experience they deliver, reaping rewards in higher customer satisfaction, greater customer loyalty, a larger number of customers, and more profits per customer.

Here’s a summary of the best practices we’ve found in the design of customer experience scorecards:

1. Identify the stages in your customers’ lifecycles that they care about the most, as well as the customer roles involved at each of those stages.

2. Discover your customers’ most critical scenarios within each of those lifecycle stages.

3. Have customers pinpoint the most critical make or break points—their moments of truth. Select three to five of these to monitor and improve.

4. Get customers to define how they measure success at each of those points, and set your performance targets accordingly. These are your customer metrics—your operational customer experience KPIs.

5. Monitor performance for each KPI at the appropriate frequency (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly).

6. Survey customers for satisfaction and loyalty for each of these customer KPIs.

7. Report performance on both customer metrics and customer satisfaction and loyalty scores first to the employees who are empowered to improve the Quality of Customer Experience. Summarize the performance trends for the management of the company on a monthly and quarterly basis.

8. (Extra credit!) Correlate customer growth, customer retention, customer spending, and customer profits with your performance on your customer experience metrics.

We’ll look at how computer supplier Dell, grocery retailer Tesco, and the financing subsidiary of a global construction equipment manufacturer have defined and are using their respective customer experience scorecards.