People Don’t Talk This Way: The Need for Consumer-Centric KPIs

Earlier this year someone asked me what my biggest lesson of 2017 was. My response surprised them:

“The Consumer Journey is not Consumer-Centric,” I said.

Around this time, I started to present the concept to VPs of Consumer Experience or VPs of Consumer Data. The response was always one of shock.

“Wait, how can that be true?” they wanted to know.

The answer is one born of collective inertia. Customer experience and customer journeys have been hot-button topics for years now, and most forward-thinking companies have embraced the need for this fundamental reorientation of the ways they go to market. What hasn’t changed, however, is our methodology and framework for measuring such change. We are still working with the old scorecard in a new game.

Where we stand today

If you think about the average consumer journey framework at face value, it’s obvious it is not a consumer-centric one. When was the last time you said, “I’m aware of this brand!” or “I’m engaging with a brand!” as you surf their website. Now all of sudden you tell your friends you’re “Really loyal to this brand!”

Source: Mckinsey

It just doesn’t happen. People don’t talk this way. Therefore any framework based on these expectations for consumer behavior cannot be a people-centric.

Now, this isn’t to say you shouldn’t be working from a classic consumer journey. It is actually a useful business framework that defines the checkpoints it would like to send consumers along (again, not consumer-centric). This can be necessary for contextualizing business and marketing strategies in how well they are driving an outcome and if there are any major leaks in the desired path to conversion.

A consumer-centric framework comes in to contextualize questions like, “Does the consumer find value in my product?”

Most brands believe they are answering this question by using a consumer journey KPI like conversion or, in other words, revenue. This is logical. It makes sense if revenue goes up, there must be some value the consumer is finding in the product. But we have to go deeper to find human contextualization.

I like to reference Google’s Micro-Moments as a best in-class example of a consumer-centric framework. Ideally, you would make yours more specific to your brand, but no matter what, it’s a great place to start.

The basic premise comes from statements such as “I want to learn” or “I want to go.” This actually frames up a person’s state of mind. If you can categorize content in this format, you can now understand the reason a consumer has visited your experience.

Source: Think with Google

If you can understand the reason someone has visited your experience, you can then personalize based their mindset. Voila! That is how you become a consumer-centric brand.

Follow the money

Let’s break it down a bit more on what the most common business KPI, revenue, is reallyanswering.

Revenue is the cash amount of goods or services sold. This means that a lot of variables like pricing discounts, supply chain, interest rates, or the economy in general all come into play to impact performance of the KPI. Sure, consumer interest may cause an uptick in revenue. Or it could be performance of the website or AdWords. No consumer would buy something that isn’t valuable to them or from a non-working website.

But no matter how much economic data we input, there are just too many other factors that impact revenue to accurately describe how a consumer feels about your product.

Another danger brands run into is the optimization of their entire digital product around a single consumer journey point like conversion (revenue). When brands do this they drastically reduce the scope of their reach with potential buyers.

When optimizing a digital product around the final funnel stage of revenue conversation, you’re really only optimizing for finding consumers who were already in the market to buy your product!

Marketing algorithms, for example, are predicting the users who are likely to perform these kinds of actions in the first place (i.e., make a purchase) and then showing them an ad. In the context of A/B testing, you are optimizing around making it easier for users who were already looking to buy something by reducing barriers in that conversion funnel.

The same holds true for optimizing around the other generalized consumer journey points. If you optimize towards awareness, you’re just optimizing to get more people to your website, or worse, optimizing around people seeing your banner ad. If you optimize towards research, you are actually optimizing to get someone to a specific page on your site or filling out a form, but you aren’t evaluating if the content was valuable to those users in the first place.

It’s for these two reasons — consumer journey KPIs don’t accurately describe consumer desire and businesses optimize to their own desires instead of a customer — that all brands must adopt a new consumer-centric KPI framework.

So what is it?

Now there are a too many methodologies to create custom consumer-centric frameworks to name here. We can define, however, just what such a framework is and how it should be used to describe how a consumer feels.

As stated earlier, a consumer-centric framework uses words that consumers actually use. For example, if you’re a shoe brand a consumer might say, “I need a black heel in my size to wear to a wedding this weekend.”

In this case, the retailer likely already has their inventory categorized by color and type of shoe. This allows users to find possible shoes that are “black heels” on a site or through search. But it doesn’t actually answer the question.

Doing a quick search on DSW, the query “Black Heel” resulted in 4,291 items. They have a “Need It Today” selection that will filter results based on local store inventory. They even have a whole filtering section by occasion. When I select those two filters, 11 options pop up.

What a wonderful way to optimize the experience around a consumer-centric question! That experience just built loyalty without the consumer having to say, “I’m loyal.” They delivered their experience in the way I was thinking about the product. #happycustomer

Of course you can’t account for all of the statements a consumer may ask as it relates to your brand when designing a product. This is exactly why you need a framework.