Key Experience Indicators: How to decide what to measure?

When you measure smaller parts of the experience (only important ones, not everything), you get an indication of what specifically works well and what doesn’t. You can then dive deeper into the problem areas to understand why.

Chef Antonella opened her new restaurant six months ago. Everything has been going really well, it seemed. Revenue is up and to the right, tables are reserved in advance, and the restaurant is full and lively every single night. Business metrics show a very positive picture.

Chef Antonella also measures two key experience indicators she cares about. These paint a different picture. Close to 100% of customers are new. She has almost no returning customers. Second, on average, 70% of food is left on the plates. Something is wrong although business is great.

🔑 Why measure experience?

Key Experience Indicators (KEIs) provide a quantitative score of a specific, important, and actionable phenomenon related to using a product or service. Measuring KEIs has the following benefits:

1. KEIs provide information to decision makers.
2. KEIs precede or predict business outcomes.
3. KEIs give insights into qualitative findings and customer anecdotes.

🔬Considerations of KEI measurements

What vs. why: KEIs will never explain themselves. To understand a KEI, one must invest in qualitative research.

Results of experience-related measurements for three alternative designs. Design a is better than b and c, yet you don’t know why until you make an effort to learn.

Good vs. bad: It is not always clear whether KEIs are showing a positive or negative phenomenon.

Can you tell if these are good or bad?

• Average time to first click is 49 seconds.
• Average time on site is 27:38 minutes.
• Homepage bounce rate is 99%.

Attitude vs. behavior: what people say does not necessarily match how they behave. People’s attitude is interesting yet behavior is much more telling. Give more attention and weight to behavioral rather than attitudinal metrics.

Chef Antonella’s restaurant is providing great coffee. Yet if you ask one of Antonella’s customers to rate her satisfaction with coffee immediately after she found a mistake on the check, coffee might be getting low scores. Coffee…