For the past five years, I’ve been leading Forrester’s research on measuring customer experience. With the recent explosion of interest in customer experience overall and the perennial popularity of metrics as a topic within that space, we’ve decided to expand the team that covers it.

I’ll continue to write reports about general measurement best practices and how to apply them in an enterprise-level experience measurement program. My colleague Adele Sage is adding to that body of work by exploring how the latest experience measurement theory applies in digital channels like Web, mobile, tablets, and whatever new channel they dream up next. And in fact, she just published her first two reports in this research stream:

  • "What Are The Right Web Customer Experience Success Metrics?" In this report, Adele translates our general customer experience measurement framework into the specific categories of metrics you need to assess the quality of your website experience. The report helps customer experience pros understand how survey response and web analytics data work together to paint a complete picture and drive continuous improvement.
  • "Website Customer Experience Metrics Inventory Worksheet." This worksheet takes the framework from Adele’s first report and turns it into a useful tool for customer experience professionals in charge of web experience measurement. They can use it to quickly organize the current slate of web metrics, based on how well they align with definitions of experience quality. The worksheet helps you quickly see any gaps that need to be closed, and which web metrics — though useful for other things — aren’t really relevant to the experience equation.

Over the coming quarters, Adele and I will continue to expand our research on customer experience measurement, so stay tuned. We’ve got reports planned on topics like which technologies you need in order to collect, analyze, and report customer experience metrics, customer experience dashboard design, and measuring experience quality in emerging channels such as mobile Web and tablets.

If you have questions about either of these reports or our upcoming research, don’t hesitate to reach out to one or both of us. We look forward to expanding the conversation around customer experience measurement and bringing you more new research in this fast-moving space.