Metrics are people too

Putting customers first is our top priority at TELUS digital. The best way we can do this is by making things easier for our customers. We know that when customers need to reach us, they generally prefer to go online. That’s why My Account, where customers can make changes to their accounts online, is such a critical part of the telus.com redesign.

One of the ways we measure success here is the number of customers who are able to complete tasks online where they previously would have needed to call. We look at this from two angles. The first is how often and why customers call us. The second is how customers use the website. Customers contact us over the phone or through the website for a wide variety of reasons. Some of the more complex tasks and issues are handled best over the phone with a live agent. However, the majority of these interactions can be addressed online and, if done right, much faster and more conveniently. We aim to empower customers to do more online and continually improve the self-serve experience.

Using data to create a better customer experience

At TELUS digital, we’ve adopted an outcome-based approach to measuring success and determining what we need to do next. If you’ve ever read or watched Moneyball, this is going to sound familiar. The surface level numbers don’t always tell the whole story and the inputs aren’t always directly linked to the outcomes. We collect an ocean of data and need to focus on the metrics that help us understand what’s working and what’s not working for our customers. If we can identify the metrics that matter, we can make a better connection between the data and the customer experience. This gives us more meaningful insight and enables us to make the right improvements sooner.

An example of this would be something we noticed with the My Account registration process. If we only paid attention to the number of registered users, we might be happy with the fact that the numbers keep growing. However, when we took a deeper look at the registration process, we found that a lot of customers who started it were not able to complete it. When we’re talking about something that thousands of customers go through each month, this is a big deal. It was clear that the experience needed work and this insight led us to gather feedback and redesign the process flow. While we’ve seen some progress, we know there’s still more work to be done. This is just one of many examples of how we’re trying to improve on what we’ve built.

We constantly gather feedback and dig deeper into the data in an effort to understand the customer experience better. Qualitative feedback we get from surveys can be difficult to evaluate holistically across millions of customers, but it’s incredibly valuable because it lets us hear exactly what our customers are thinking. This helps us validate or challenge whether we’re working on the right problems or not.

The intent of all this is to be able to translate metrics into a human interaction. We need to remember that metrics are people too – there are real customers on the other side of those page views and clicks. Regardless of what the surface level numbers might tell us, the new My Account can only be considered successful if our customers’ experiences are truly improving.