How IT Can Measure Return on Experience (ROX) Effectively

Information technology (IT) people love to measure everything. Clicks, files stored, uptime, load times, costs, error rates, and other metrics tie to our companies’ digital footprint. Why are we so obsessed with metrics? Because you cannot grow what you don’t measure. We want to capture the value gained from digital transformation, and help identify the gaps. If you’re looking to track progress, the most comprehensive measure of business value delivered by IT is return on experience (ROX). You simply can’t afford not to include it in your metrics analysis.

IT leaders carry huge responsibility for return on experience

Every digital experience is a path to customer, partner, and employee success. It’s up to IT leaders to deliver digital experiences that move the company forward on time and on budget. Measuring ROX as you go keeps projects on track and makes them far more successful in the end.

ROX captures the results of your investments in digital experiences. In many cases, it’s the justification and rationale for these investments. These experiences include everything from blogs, mobile commerce, online customer service, HR portals, and novel uses of connected devices. To measure ROX, you need to proactively track and measure key metrics related to the experience and your organization’s overall vision.

To measure ROX for IT, use a combination of these metrics:

• One or two relevant speed and cost metrics, like how long it takes a person to fill out a registration form. 
• A customer-focused metric, like net promoter score or customer satisfaction. 
• Include a metric or two from the business leader driving the experience, such as seamlessness to implement across teams.

For instance, on a website, make IT metrics and other success metrics part of experience planning from the beginning. IT may be focused on 100% uptime, 20% cost reduction, and simple integrations with existing systems. A marketer might care more about conversion rates or other key marketing metrics.

Key metrics for evaluating ROX for IT

Here are a few sample metrics you can use to get started:

1. Speed

You’re probably already tracking speed performance metrics for your digital experiences, such as commerce, service, and mobile. Keep it up – no one will stick around for a digital experience that takes too long to load. You can also measure and track time to task completion for key user experiences, such as subscribing to your newsletter, updating account information, or making a purchase. A good experience will be faster for users without increasing bounce or abandon rates. Consider PUMA, which transformed and relaunched its mobile sites, and gained speed in the process. Its mobile sites render 35% faster and load 69% faster. 

2. Time to market

This metric measures the total time required to develop and launch a product or feature. Consider it a key IT success metric for digital experiences. Sierra Wireless invested in its developer experience; customers could create proofs of concept more quickly. The result? Its customers are completing projects in three to six months that might have previously taken as long as 18 months. 

3. Cost to maintain

Track the impact of digital experience investments in both technology and resource use. Moving to better digital experiences will likely involve an upfront IT investment. But very often, that investment involves removing a dated technology that drains resources. Take content management systems (CMS) as an example. Traditional CMS can turn content management ideas into IT projects. In contrast, some approaches to CMS empower content creators to do more without requiring IT resources other than governance. And more importantly, they also support better digital experiences.

4. Cost to implement

Upfront costs impact ROX, too. Add up all the costs of the technology, professional services, and training needed to support the experience. Consider budgeted costs as well as actual costs. Delivering at or below budget is appreciated by any organization, large or small.

5. Engagement

Successful digital experiences engage an audience. You can measure the ROX of virtually any experience simply by tracking engagement rates for the intended audience. For instance, NOW TV created an experience that helped service agents find information faster. Daily agent engagement with learning and training content quickly soared from 50% to nearly 100%.

6. Customer satisfaction

Calculate this metric by asking customers to rate their satisfaction with an experience or specific interaction on a 10-point scale and average the results. Customer satisfaction provides you with an idea of how successful a digital experience is overall. This is a good metric to consider along with costs. A digital experience that positively shifts costs but lowers overall satisfaction is incomplete.

7. Net promoter score (NPS)

Like customer satisfaction, you capture data for this metric by surveying customers. NPS measures the likelihood of customers to recommend your brand. Ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand using a 10-point scale. Scores of 9s and 10s are promoters, 7s and 8s are satisfied, and lower scores come from detractors. Subtract your percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. That’s your NPS. Best Buy Canada saw a year-over-year increase in NPS of 9.5% by improving the experience it delivers to customers.