Some companies integrate goals to enhance their CRM strategy. Improving user experience will improve conversion from lead to customer. It will also increase the likelihood the customer will return to buy from you again.
If you measure user experience, you can see where you can improve the customer journey.
Measuring user experience on a small scale is relatively easy. You can simply observe users or ask them questions. At scale, this is more difficult. Google UX research teams developed the HEART framework to evaluate the quality of user experiences.
Define UX Metrics With the HEART Framework
Categories of Metrics
The framework consists of five categories of metrics:
Happiness is a measure of attitude or satisfaction - usually over time, rather than just a snapshot at one moment, which can be deceptive. Net promoter score (NPS) measures the likelihood of giving a recommendation and is a commonly used metric for customer happiness.
Engagement measures how often and how deeply people interact naturally with your product or service.
Adoption is the number of new users over a set period. It is affected by increased (or decreased) sales and marketing activity.
Retention measures how long your existing customers remain. It can also be expressed as a negative measure (a churn).
Task success can be both simple “Did the user do what they wanted?” or more nuanced, “How long did it take?” Shopping basket abandonment could be an example of a failed task - as would an error rate.
GSM Process
Once you've decided on the factors that matter to your business, use the GSM process to establish your UX metrics.
Setting goals or objectives. It can be harder than you’d think to articulate the goals for a project. In our car rental example, a goal could be for someone to come back and rent a car multiple times, which falls under the retention category in the HEART framework.
Defining signals. By defining your goals with signals, you are diving down another level. How will success or failure translate into user behavior? In our example, improved retention would equal new customers returning to rent another car.
Choosing metrics. Having identified the signals, you can now define metrics and study how they change over time. It could involve tracking the percentage of customers who rent a car more than once a year.
Once these metrics are defined, you can start experimenting and making changes in the customer journey and following closely how the metrics change over time.
Let's Recap!
The HEART framework stands for happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success. It will help you organize your metrics into five categories.
The GSM step-by-step process helps define metrics based on goals and signals indicating you are meeting these goals.
NPS is a widely-adopted measure for customer happiness.
Be selective of the metrics you choose to report, focusing on those that matter.
Using the right metrics, you can extract valuable data from the customer experience, thus better informing you on the customer's perception of your brand. In the next chapter, you will discover how crucial it is to provide your team with a single source of knowledge regarding your clients.
