NULL
All articles
Jun 1, 2023 | Updated Oct 10, 2024

Measuring Customer Experience with Customer Success Outcomes (CSOs)

With multiple data sets, it can be hard to know where to start. Connect your research findings and define your customer experience KPIs with CSOs.
PDF

Customer feedback is likely top-of-mind if you're responsible for creating and managing products. With more feedback available than ever, you’re also juggling more data sets. 

For any product, you might have multiple research studies happening simultaneously, each measuring different features and delivering results in various formats. While each set of insights makes sense on its own, piecing them all together can quickly become overwhelming. Then, you add business metrics like sales costs and revenue on top of your CX metrics, and data silos start to pile up. 

An image showing the breakdown of data silos. Business Insights include: customer retention, sales/revenue, and CPS/CAC scores. Research insights include: market research, CSAT/NPS scores, Prototyping, Telemetry, and Usability.

According to Forrester's recent Digital CX and Design Trends report, it's common for designers, engineers, and product managers to "struggle to synthesize diverse sources of data." 

That's where customer success outcomes (CSOs) come in. CSOs help break down data silos, turn research insights into action, and establish clear customer experience metrics.

What are Customer Success Outcomes (CSOs)?

CSOs (aka jobs to be done or customer experience outcomes at Amazon) are statements made up of two parts:

  1. What the product does to address a need
  2. How the customer judges success

When mapped to a customer journey and paired with evaluative research, CSOs can help you make sense of diverse data sets.
 


For example, say we’re designing a new app called FamilyTrip that helps parents discover, plan, and book family vacations. One CSO that describes a parent's need would be to: “find enriching stops along the way with ease.”

  1. “Finding enriching stops along the way” = what the product does to address a need 
  2. “with ease” = how the customer judges success
What the product does to address the a need is finding enriching stops along the way. How the customer judges success is with ease.

Not every CSO needs to apply to your entire target audience. Instead, focus on creating CSOs that address specific aspects of the overall customer experience.

How can CSOs help break down data silos?

CSOs can help you connect the dots between different research sets. Organize your customer research by the level of insights they provide.

Graph showing the breakdown of customer research based on the level of insights. The relationship level includes: Market research and CSAT/NPS scores. The interaction level includes: prototyping, telemetry, and usability.

 

 

For example, market research insights and CX scores like NPS and CSAT operate at the "relationship level," offering a high-level view of your customer relationships.

The other common layer is the "interaction level," which focuses on specific product workflows, features, and touchpoints through concept and usability testing.

Understanding how these "relationship" and "interaction" insights connect is the challenge. Without aligning your research silos, it’s tough to determine which feature improvements will drive engagement, satisfaction, retention, and growth.

CSOs tie your interaction and relationship level together by giving you a standard set of outcomes for measuring the customer experience over time. 

How do you create CSOs and add them to your product strategy?

NULL

Step 1: Define your CSOs

You can derive your outcome statements from the insights you gather during foundational research. Each CSO you create should include a “job” and a success measure.

Customer Success Outcome (CSO) equals what the product does to address a need, plus how the customer judges success.

What the product does (or the “job) can be thought of in a few ways:

  • Jobs to be done
  • UX goals
  • Desired outcome statements
     

Each CSO should include a single verb and some form of directionality — words like “less,” “more,” “faster,” “easier,” “maximize,” or “minimize.” Here are some other CSOs we might create for FamilyTrip:

  • View your daily planned itinerary quickly
  • Choose food stops that accommodate dietary restrictions with more confidence
  • Share trip highlights with family and friends easily

Tips for defining CSOs:

  • Revisit existing research: Your foundational research should tell you what customers want to achieve when they use your products and services. 
  • Conduct in-depth qualitative research: Qualitative interviews uncover your users' needs and pain points. 
  • Aim for 30-40 CSOs: Schedule an internal workshop with the co-researchers to review qualitative insights and generate your outcome statements. 
  • Map your CSOs to a journey: Consider how you'll map your outcome statements to a journey map. This will help you leverage them to target specific aspects of the experience.
NULL

Step 2: Integrate CSOs into your evaluative research

Once you map your CSOs to a customer journey, leverage them as part of an evaluative research program like usability testing and concept evaluation.

By combining your CSO assessment with evaluative research, you gain insight into your performance on the cx metrics that matter most to your customers.

Image of a researcher and a research participant during a research study.

 

Your CSO work isn't done yet. Revisit your outcome statements regularly to keep improving your product and measuring customer experience success.

NULL

Step 3: Build CSOs into your cx measurement program

CSOs should be part of ongoing CX measurement. One way to do this is by setting up a recurring customer survey. Here's an example of how that could look for FamilyTrip.

Finding enriching stops along the way. How important is this to planning your vacation? 1 - not at all, 2, 3, 4, 5-Completely. How satisfied are you with your ability to do this with the solutions you currently have? 1 - Not at all, 2, 3, 4, 5, Completely.

Once you have your survey insights, prioritize which problems to address first. Strategies for prioritizing CSOs include:

  • Segmenting by persona
  • Using satisfaction and value metrics to organize into opportunity types
  • Correlating with engagement or other usage metrics

Implementing a new CX metric

Incorporating CSOs into your strategy can have a big impact on your product success, just like it did for Prime Video. While many factors contribute to this success, aligning the team around CX metrics played a significant role.

Start by conducting foundational research to understand your customers and define your CSOs. Then, evaluate your CSOs throughout every research phase, from concept to usability testing. Finally, embed CSOs into your ongoing CX measurement to track progress and identify product gaps.

Reach out to learn more about building and testing CSOs as part of your product strategy!