Or…what your business metrics and CNN tell you about your customers’ experience as they learn about their options

A few weeks ago, I started a series here about how your customer experience performance shows up in your commonly monitored business metrics (see part 1: series kickoff and part 2 about your metrics and the triggering need step of your customer experience.)

At each step of your customer experience, your existing metrics can help you answer two big questions:

1. Are the daily operating actions across your organization aligned with your target, or ideal customer experience?
2. Is your customer experience costing your organization money, or making it money?

Every customer experience starts with a person who has a need, desire, or problem they would trade something of value (usually money) to have solved.   When they act, their next step is to learn about good options.  Their goal is to settle on a short list.  This “Learn” step is our focus here.  Your goal is to earn their consideration and make the short list.

“Good” options – from your prospect’s point of view – look like credible ideas to solve their need.  Good options may vary widely in approach.  If my problem is a stiff neck, I may consider a new pillow, ibuprofen, a chiropractor, or a massage.  Do you know your full competitive field?

Here are some common business metrics that indicate the effectiveness of your customer experience at this step:

• The number of prospects who consider your brand, product or service, and organization
• The ratio of target to non-target prospects and returning customers who consider you.  In other words, are you attracting the right people?
• The return on the expenses you spend to generate qualified leads or prospects

How are you doing?

For an example of who’s doing smart things at this step, I look to CNN.  (I know, it sounds like I just wrote a commercial for Anderson Cooper. Hang with me.)  Remember the old days of the World Wide Web, when if you wanted to share an Web page with someone, you had to cut and paste the URL into an email and hit “send”?  Our email software and Web browsers were solving a problem for us, making it possible to share information and opinions with others.  It’s all ancient history now, of course, considering that on sites like CNN.com you can click “share” and within seconds, enter your Facebook or Twitter password, type in an opinion or opening note, and, voila, your community sees it all.

Why does CNN in particular make it so easy to share its proprietary content?  My theory is that it’s purely because, by offering the “share” ability, CNN is immediately better able to help prospective readers learn about the network as a great option for global, active news.

In a nutshell, CNN uses “Share” to let customer-readers help them put its most valuable asset – its content – in the most natural path that its (especially younger) new readers use when looking for news and the opinions of their friends and family.  At this step, prospective readers learn about CNN as an option when they receive a shared story.  (It also proves its promise of engagement with the news to customers and engaged eyeballs to advertisers – but that’s another step of the experience for them and different performance metric for CNN.)

I’ll bet CNN’s leaders are tracking the number of new or newly reacquainted readers that visit from “Share links” and other ways of getting new customers.  Like you, they are tracking new customers against the investment in expenses to get them.  I wonder if CNN seeing an evolution of its market demographic, trending toward more access to and interest from younger and more gadget-savvy readers.  I presume this evolution is just the kind of people CNN wants to attract, affecting their ratio of target to non-target prospects acquired at this step.

And how is CNN doing overall?  While Time Warner doesn’t break out CNN performance, the network surpassed MSNBC in primetime ratings for the first time earlier this year.  More investments in its website are on the docket.  Time Warner chief executive Jeffrey Bewkes said March 2 that CNN‘s profit more than doubled in the past four years.  Nice.

What are your metrics telling you?

If your operating actions are aligned to solving a need for target customers better than anyone else can, your customer experience will make money for your organization.  Look for proof of your own alignment to customers as they learn about their options for solving their problem, including you.