The Digital Happiness Index: Quantifying Your Customer Experience

Although conversions are the desired outcome of a good customer experience, they are not the end-all be-all for brands. A happy customer may make a one-time purchase, but more importantly, a happy customer will return to do business with your company time and time again.

But, how exactly do you define something as elusive as customer happiness? How do you understand the nuances of customer frustration and pinpoint what exactly fosters engagement? And, how do you turn all of this data and intelligence into an effective retention strategy that drives greater customer lifetime value (CLV)? 

There are plenty of systems designed to measure user experience; these primarily deal with the pages users visit on your site, conversions, and the oft-cited biggest UX failure: bounces. 

But, unfortunately, basic user experience metrics won’t give you enough insight into the nuances of users’ digital happiness. Sure, studying on-page experience, bounce rate, time on page, and other CX metrics are important, but they only give you a one-dimensional view of your customer experience. They fail to give you rich insights into customer sentiment. Fortunately, there is a metric that does exactly that: the Digital Happiness Index. 

Calculated from several other behavioral metrics and consolidated into one mega metric, the Digital Happiness Index (DHI) is a unique measure of visitor satisfaction, providing an objective view of whether or not your overall experience is hitting the right notes.

In this article we’ll look at:

  1. What Is Digital Happiness And How Can You Achieve It?
  2. What is The Current State of Digital Happiness?
  3. Calculating the DHI: the 5 Dimensions of Digital Experience
  4. Making Sense of the Digital Happiness Index

 

What Is Digital Happiness And How Can You Achieve It?

Before we delve directly into the DHI, let’s start by focusing on digital happiness. A rather simple concept, it denotes the convenience, satisfaction, and even the pleasure of interacting with a website or online interface, such as a search engine results page (SERP). 

As a feeling, it is incidentally difficult to pin down, even in the digital realm. But by using Contentsquare’s DHI metric, you can determine how happy your site visitors are, based on their experience with your site or app. 

The first of its kind, the DHI combines KPIs from 5 key pillars that contribute to overall customer satisfaction: 

  1. Flawless: Are customers enjoying a smooth experience free of technical performance issues?
  2. Engaged: Are customers engaging with and satisfied with the content?
  3. Sticky: Are visitors loyal, returning to the site frequently?
  4. Intuitive: Does the navigation make it easy for visitors to enjoy a complete experience?
  5. Empowered: How easy is it for customers to find the products and services right for them?

Is your site’s navigation seamless and friction-free? Is your content proving effective in helping visitors reach their goals? Are visitors coming back to your site? Are they exiting early or completing their journeys? And finally, are they finding what they’re looking for — be that information or products?

By quantifying these various strands of experience, and combining metrics into one score, the DHI provides brands with an objective grasp of whether or not visitors are enjoying a positive experience.

 

What is The Current State of Digital Happiness?

To better understand the current state of digital happiness in the world, we recently surveyed over 500 marketers and 4,000 shoppers from around the globe in our new Digital Happiness Pulse survey. Here are some of the shocking findings the survey revealed:

1. Most Marketers Can’t Measure Digital Happiness

If brands are going to understand and improve the happiness of their digital customers, they need to focus on using the right metrics, getting access to the right customer data, and the right technology to make the first two possible.

2. Why Today’s Customers Are Unhappy Online

When asked if they feel happy when shopping online, only 15% of consumers said yes. Considering that a quarter (25%) of customers feel nervous about shopping in-store since COVID-19, now is the time for brands to get serious about making online experiences just as good as — or better than — those in-store.

Every brand’s goal should be to create digital experiences that ensure customers leave your app, site, or online store happier than when they arrived. This doesn’t mean losing focus on retention, market share or brand awareness, but rather thinking about those objectives in the context of satisfying customers and building experiences they’ll love.

Calculating The DHI: The 5 Dimensions of Digital Experience 

Using behavioral data from our tool, the DHI separates the data into 5 dimensions to filter the numbers into intelligible concepts behind visitors’ digital happiness. Our clients get a comparison to industry standards, and every score represents an aggregate of every session on the website.

As we mentioned earlier, the DHI has 5 components or 5 dimensions that make up its final score, a number out of 100. To calculate a site’s DHI, we take the average of the 5 scores of each dimension. To come up with this rating, we consider the following five dimensions: flawless, engaged, sticky, intuitive, and empowered. 

Each of these 5 individual scores is determined by its own calculations, based on metrics like time spent on site, time spent engaging with pages/elements, bounce rates, and more. 

It also takes into account if users have reached their destinations and the way they’ve done so. It captures whether users ran into UX issues like non-intuitive navigation — clicks on non-clickable content, misleading clicks, etc.


Making Sense of the Digital Happiness Index

Innovations in SaaS and marketing have led to more avant-garde methods of measuring digital customer experience and benchmarking customer satisfaction. 

Although the complex, 5-tier system of our mega metric is supplemental, it is very much in line with our granular approach to behavioral analytics. 

The fact that the 5 dimensions deal with different occurrences in the UX means the DHI is casting as wide a net as possible to capture your customer’s mindset. Based on this score, you can shine light on areas of friction and other obstacles in the customer decision journey. 

Customers today will not hesitate to review a poor UX or give one star for a session that doesn’t meet their expectations. But they are also giving you continuous feedback on your site or app through their interactions — with every tap, click, scroll or hover, they are voicing their feelings about your CX. 

Here at Contentsquare, we give brands the tools to capture this on-page feedback so you can hear and understand what your customers feel and want. 

Happiness of any kind is difficult to pin down to a numerical format. But, by combining the 5 pillars of the UX, you will come as close as possible to determining how digitally happy your visitors are with your content.

 

4 Customer Experience Trends That Will Give You The Edge In 2021

Seems like just yesterday we were pouring over lists of predictions for 2020, and considering all the ways in which the digital experience wars would heat up. But that was a whole year (and lifetime!) ago, and heat up they did…

Little did we know what lay ahead, and the extent to which the best-laid digital plans would need to be rethought. While customer journey analysis was already the key brand differentiator in 2019, the pandemic context and lockdown shift to digital, drastically raised the bar on CX-cellence, and forced many companies to fast-track digital improvements to stay relevant.

Maintaining business continuity as the world around us shut down became a key focus of brands everywhere, and beyond its status as the ‘convenient’ option, digital emerged as the only ‘always-reliable’ option. 

Overnight, we all became acutely aware of how much we relied on digital — to stay informed, order necessities, keep working, socialize, etc. With our offline lives restricted, being online was suddenly a much more emotional affair. 

It certainly has been a challenging year. The speed of digital acceleration has been fierce, but it has also put brands in a much better position to write the future of customer experience. And one thing’s for sure: businesses today are a whole lot closer to their customers than they were this time last year. Now using DXP software is the next step towards dominating the eCommerce world.

Instead of offering predictions in these anything-but-predictable times, here are four 2021 customer experience trends to look out for this year:


1. Customer centricity as the “means”, not the objective

Customer-centric isn’t a badge of honor, it’s a verb. What do I mean by that? That the only way to ensure your experience is aligned with your customers’ wants and needs is to make sure your CX strategy is driven by the people who use your services or shop your platform. After all, consumers are continuously communicating their likes and dislikes with every tap, scroll, hover and swipe — collecting this feedback and understanding their digital language is key to building the experiences your visitors want and deserve.

In fact, you could say that 2020 revived the lost art of listening. The pandemic affected customer behaviors in ways we could never have predicted, forcing businesses to listen more closely than ever before to consumer priorities. Supermarkets piloted virtual lines to help shoppers avoid crowds, resort group ClubMed refocused its offering on at-home activities, and many others were able to rethink the way they do things and even reinvent themselves.  

Hopefully, 2021 will not throw quite so many challenges our way, but one thing is certain: customer-centricity needs to be baked into your experience strategy. The good news is, if your methods and technology are customer-driven, and if your innovation is spurred by customer insight, you’ll be able to cut through the noise and excel in your CX. By using funnel optimization tools, mobile app heatmapping, and sessions replay you will blow the competition out of the water.


2. Keep the digital momentum going

The pace of digital transformation these past twelve months has been dizzying, it’s true. But now’s not the time to slow down! 2020 has been described as a ‘before and after’ year, and where digital is concerned, there is certainly no going back. Consumer behaviors have changed a lot this year: people who never shopped online now have standing orders on online grocery sites, we meet our doctors virtually, even our children have Zoom accounts. And brands have had to think on their feet to enhance and expand the digital CX: from launching new eComm platforms to adopting AR technology overnight, bridging the gap between offline and online has tested many a company’s agility this year.

The silver lining is that this type of crisis management has helped brands improve their ability to roll out successful digital initiatives at scale and speed. And if there’s one thing we know about customer behaviors, it’s that they are anything but static. Equipping your team with the ability (and tools!) to respond quickly and efficiently to the unpredictable is the best way to ensuring ongoing agility and digital success.


3. Digital happiness & the emotional side of analytics

We’ve all experienced emotionally-charged situations online this year. From setting an alarm clock to refresh the delivery slot page in the middle of the night to failing to set up your child’s remote learning account — our increased reliance on digital has come with its fair share of frustrations. It’s no surprise then that Forrester is predicting “CI leaders will shift 10% of their insights budget to emotion analytics” this year. Indeed, tracking clicks and conversions is not going to tell you all that much about how visitors feel about the CX. However, The use of tools like page heatmapping, visual merchandising analytics, and AI analytics will do just that.

New behaviors require new metrics. The ability to understand what frustrates visitors and what delights them is key to creating human digital experiences and personalization that actually matters. Retention, conversion, market share and brand awareness will continue to be key focuses of marketers everywhere, but if you can say your customers leave your app, site or online store happier than when they arrived, you’re doing something very right.


4. Who needs predictions when you have predictive analytics?

But how on earth do you make sure your customers are digitally satisfied? Well, there is an antidote to guesswork. Customer behaviors change fast and furiously but if you’re able to monitor digital interactions and surface opportunities for improvement in real-time, you’ll be able to keep pace with your customers. This type of agility is not only helpful to navigate a time of crisis, but will also be hugely beneficial around high-impact events like Black Friday. Think about it: if you can be alerted to any CX obstacles as they occur and fix them instantly, you won’t have to save your insight-gleaning for the post-mortem. 

When it comes to digital, you can’t predict the future but you can prepare your business for it. In order to have the competitive edge in 2021, brands will need to continuously improve the performance of their digital assets while creating value through innovation. Businesses that can combine a problem-solving mindset with a creative approach to experience building will be poised for success this year and going forward.

Data: The Secret Weapon for Customer Satisfaction

Being data-driven isn’t something you can just proclaim. It’s something you have to work towards and maintain. 

How are today’s brands becoming more data-driven? They’re adopting new tools and incrementally making changes based on their data and analysis.

As the eCommerce landscape continues to get more and more competitive, now is a great time for brands to start building a data-centric culture and implement the tools they need to succeed in a crowded marketplace. This can help them make data-driven decisions about the customer journey analytics and, ultimately, improve customer satisfaction.

We talked to data guru Mathieu Staat, who is a Digital & Customer Marketing Director EME at Sephora, a leading beauty brand that has been becoming more and more data-driven over the last few years and depended heavily on data to roll out its beloved Beauty Insider customer loyalty program. 

First-party data, privacy, the customer experience, and more – we asked Staat to share his views on how data can impact companies and their customers, as well as how Sephora is using data to engage its fans: 

 

How does data contribute to creating better customer experiences in the cosmetics industry?

Yes, quite clearly. Data supports six different cornerstones at Sephora. First of all, there is its contribution to advertising. We can now optimize everything by using data: targeting specific audience segments, excluding certain users, finding new customer segments, implementing the right incentives, and identifying the right triggers at the right time to retain customers.

Then, there’s also online and offline touchpoint optimization. Data acts as an icebreaker in the customer journey and allows us to personalize the relationship regardless of whatever channel the customer uses to come in contact with the brand. Data means we can be much more relevant with our content and the things we offer to our customers in-store, just like online.

As for customer service, data has helped us make a huge amount of progress and become much more efficient. Our tools mean we can respond immediately through automatic interactions, cutting out the need to contact customer service with dynamic FAQs and chatbots, for example. There are limits, of course, and some requests still go to customer service if necessary.

 

What is your approach to privacy and security?

Of course, everything has to comply with GDPR. Data is secure and our stance is obviously “privacy first”. Access to data is controlled and secure; for example, a customer’s bank details are inaccessible and highly protected. As we look to innovate further, particularly with biometric payment, this means thinking hard about the security aspects of this type of payment and conforming to PSD2.

 

I think that leaves us three more cornerstones to discuss?

Exactly! And they aren’t insignificant. Data also helps with pricing, supply, and logistics – particularly in terms of forecasts. Our algorithm can predict order quantities on the basis of data related to current and future campaigns, seasonality, and new products, for example. There is obviously a limit. We can’t predict everything, including external factors. We’ve especially seen this with the health crisis this year. It is, and will always be, necessary to make human adjustments.

Lastly, our sixth cornerstone is benchmarking analysis reports. Is my strategy working? How is conversion changing? 

 

Data’s growing role within businesses inevitably leads to organizational changes. How’s that going at Sephora?

Quite honestly, very well. As soon as you can offer accuracy and precision, everyone is happy. That said, you have to bear in mind that data can’t do everything on its own. You have to find a balance somewhere between manual and automatic. You always need the human touch! 

 

What is the greatest benefit a data-driven policy can offer?

I may be stating the obvious, but data is a huge gold mine! It helps us understand our customers, adapt, anticipate, and stand out from the crowd. It’s thanks to this 360° data that our loyalty programs perform so well.

 

How can we measure the impact of data?

Aggregating information is useless if you don’t learn lessons from it or if your approach isn’t easy to put into action. Data not only means we can identify pain points, but also points of delight. From there, we can prioritize optimizations and analyze the impact of the investments we’ve made, both for the company (conversion) and for the customers (satisfaction). 

This can come across on marketing budgets too. By optimizing actions, we can reduce some of their costs. But above all else, we measure data’s impact by measuring its impact on customer satisfaction. We’ve seen a huge uptick in customer satisfaction thanks to improved journeys both online and in-store.

 

How do you measure customer satisfaction?

We use journey analysis tools such as Contentsquare and we do a lot of A/B testing. We have carried out plenty of qualitative and quantitative studies. It is important to monitor NPS and to maintain a customer satisfaction panel. Panels are particularly vital for quickly understanding obstacles or how to accelerate omnichannel conversions. Monitoring customer satisfaction is crucial, especially for cracking the code to increasing customer conversion.

 

What advice would you give to brands who want to become more data-driven?

You have to be careful not to collect data just for data’s sake. You can easily get lost in investigating your numbers and leave without any interesting insights to show for it. It’s important to set targets and act on the data you have. You should aim to use data to improve your business KPIs and customer satisfaction while quantifying your efforts along the way. 

 

What do you think of digitally native brands taking more ownership of their first-party data?

First-party data is certainly being discussed more and more by brands. We’re coming at it from a different angle. At Sephora, we’re trying to reduce our dependence on third parties. With our ad server, for example, we have this data directly in-hand. But, this raises the question of data storage and how to deal with a multitude of storage locations. 

In the past, this data could be atomized, but getting it back together and accessing it could be complex. We now host a very large proportion of our data in Europe on the Google Cloud Platform. Our customer data is not shared with third parties for commercial purposes. Like many brands, we want to be in charge of our data within an evolving, centralized ecosystem that can be used effectively, according to our needs. 

 

What will the demise of cookies change for eCommerce companies?

At the end of the day, I’m not sure it will change very much. Human creativity is limitless. There will be other solutions! 

We’re going to move from precision marketing to prediction marketing, with first-party data becoming increasingly important. We will adapt. There will be new models that put more meaning into data collection for consumers. For example, in Germany, Sephora has launched a new loyalty program, “Sephora Unlimited,” in which data sharing is rewarded by points. Data collection is evolving towards a win-win situation. We are rewarding data-sharing by offering customers something in return for engaging with our brand.