Driving insightful actions across your company is key to any successful customer focus business today. David Highbloom, a 25-year entrepreneur with extensive experience in scaling business models to emphasize new trends in the customer service experience, says that to ensure the correct business processes and strategies are in place, companies need to understand the inputs required to deliver the right set of data to produce meaningful insights. This process is called Experience Management, which refers to user experience data and operational data to measure and improve a business’s four core experiences: customer, employee, product, and brand.

As companies learn more about experience management as a quantitative process, they realize that sketching out the detailed insights and associated action points is a helpful process that provides a workable roadmap and creates an environment of thinking about the customer service experience differently. Highbloom offers several key points in creating a successful experience management program that identifies the outcome measures first and uses these points to navigate the details. Highbloom adds that once companies identify these key metrics, they should be treated as dependent variables.

The next step is to consider how these key metrics can drive improvements for both the business and the customer. For example, what changes can your company make to achieve the new vital metrics? For customers, is it better to purchase in two clicks or seven? These are called functional drivers and represent the independent variables that can be changed to drive your outcome measure up (or down). To build an operational roadmap, list all functional drivers to increase a positive customer experience and assign where you want to be in terms of achieving those drivers. Highbloom points out that many companies make the mistake of including functional drivers that cannot be changed. For example, price changes are not considered a usable driver for this exercise. Focus on what process you can change to create a more meaningful customer experience.

Highbloom says that once the report is created, it should be shared with key stakeholders for input. Sharing the report with the departments that will benefit from the data-driven insights will help define the information collected and how it is presented. This final step leads to the creation and design of your customer experience survey, which will be used as the channel to collect the data. Highbloom recommends that companies review best practices for designing survey questions.