NETTING IT OUT

How do you measure the customer experience (CX) performance of your self-service channels?

From the customers’ standpoint, the most critical performance metrics are response time and availability at the customer user interface (UI).

Response time is the period, measured in seconds, between the customer’s hitting the enter key to make a request for a component of your Self-Service CX to perform an activity until the system (and the Web) delivers a response back to the customer’s UI. Monitoring this end-to-end response time can be tricky.

Availability is the percentage of time the capabilities of your Self-Service CX are accessible to your customers at the customer UI within response times that are acceptable to your customers.

You measure response time at the customer UI through a combination of standard Web Server and Web analytics facilities and custom development to instrument the customer UI.

You measure availability by monitoring your operational processes for availability issues caused by failures and outages. You also monitor response time for availability issues caused by long response times within your operational processes.

SELF-SERVICE CX PERFORMANCE

What Is Self-Service CX Performance?

Self-service CX performance is the performance of the content, services, and data that support your customers’ self-service activities across all of the phases of the lifecycle of their relationships with you on self-service channels, specifically the Web. It’s also the performance of the cloud and your customers’ and your connections to the cloud because that’s how your customers’ requests reach you and how you deliver responses back to them.

Why self-service? Because we’ve observed a major shift toward self-service over the past few years. Three factors have been drivers for this shift. First, your customers want to do business with you via self-service, preferring the 24x7 availability of your Web site to the more limited availability and longer wait times of assisted-service channels. Second, the current recession has been strong motivation to reduce costs. Self-service channels have lower cost to serve than assisted service channels. Third, the Web has become ubiquitous. Customers expect to be able to perform virtually all of their activities in doing business with you online, and so many of them now have fast, wide connections to the Web from their desks and from their mobile devices.

Response Time and Availability Are the Key Metrics

Response time and availability are the two key metrics for self-service CX performance. Self-service CX performance is a specialization of more general system performance. It has a customer perspective, focusing on response time and availability at the customer UI rather than on internal systems efficiencies and throughput.

Connecting Customers to the Self-Service CX

© 2009 Patricia Seybold Group

Illustration 2. This illustration shows the end-to-end connectivity of customers and the Self-Service CX.

(Poor) Performance Can Be a Showstopper

Your customers have continually told us that performance, particularly response time, can be a showstopper for them in doing business with you. Whether it’s your Web site’s ability to deliver the “answer” in less than five or seven seconds or your staff’s ability to approve an application in less than a day, your customers have told us that, if you can’t respond within their timeframes, then they’re going to abandon you for the competition.

Clearly, CX performance is very important to your customers and critically important to you. Response time and availability affect your top line and your bottom line. Performance can be a key element for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability and a competitive differentiator. As a result, with this report, we’ll begin to offer research on CX performance.

Implementation Determines Performance

While (good) performance is certainly a key requirement for your CX, good performance is not a property or characteristic of the software on which you build your CX. Rather, it’s your implementation of that software that determines CX performance. Every software product has the potential to deliver good performance. It’s your responsibility and/or your SaaS supplier’s responsibility to ensure...