There has never been a better time to be a marketer who loves a dashboard. Data is cheaper, faster, and more granular than at any point in history. We can supposedly track a customer from the first impression to the final click, attach a number to almost every interaction in between, and build elegant reports that make it all look beautifully under control. However, there is a caveat, so much happens outside the ‘touchpoints’ so this perspective is ultimately flawed. Hence the research into the messy middle, and constant marketing debate about the validity of funnels.
But if you step back, sit with customers and actually listen to them talk about their experiences with brands, something odd emerges. They do not feel better understood, in fact in many cases, they feel less understood and less considered than ever.
The rise of metrics culture
Somewhere along the line, measurement stopped being a tool for understanding customers and started becoming a substitute for it. We can probably thank the big tech platforms for this obsession. A board paper with three charts and graphs feels safer than a board paper with three customer quotes. A percentage feels more authoritative than an observation. And once an organisation starts optimising for its metrics, the metrics start optimising the organisation.
Data, used well, is one of the most powerful tools we have. But data describes behaviour, it rarely explains it. Knowing that your conversion rate has dropped by 1.2% does not tell you why. Knowing that your NPS has slipped from 42 to 38 does not tell you what happened in the moments that moved the number.
The danger of oversimplifying human behaviour
As Daniel Kahneman beautifully states “Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it but they’d prefer not to” 1. Humans are not rational economic agents. If we were, the last fifty years of behavioural science would not exist. People decide under pressure, under fatigue, under anxiety, and under the influence of dozens of biases they are not consciously aware of. They are directed by things like how a choice is framed, what they saw first, what they saw last, and who else seems to be choosing it.
When we reduce all of that to a single metric on a dashboard, we do not get a clearer picture. We get a simpler one. And simpler is not always truer, or more beneficial for our understanding.
This is where a lot of ‘customer-centric’ strategies fail. The organisation is measuring something. And then it is optimising that thing. It just may not be the thing that actually drives how customers feel about the brand. Conversion is easy to measure in real time, loyalty and advocacy takes longer to surface.
Behavioural science and decision-making
When we consider the influence of behavioural biases in decision making, we start to unlock a deeper understanding of people. We often use a framework of the most common behavioural biases, grouped into 8 categories of Anxiety, Being Right, Context, Memory, Overconfidence, Simplicity, Social, and Value. Every one of these overarching themes are invisible in a standard dashboard, and every one of them is influencing customer decisions right now.
A customer who abandons a basket at checkout may not be telling you that your price is wrong. They may be experiencing Pain of Payment, where the act of handing over money feels heavier than the value they are receiving. A customer who chooses the middle option in your pricing table may not have analysed it carefully at all. They are responding to the Compromise Effect, which subtly steers people towards the safe middle choice.
None of that shows up as ‘irrational behaviour’ on a report. It shows up as a number, but remember behind that number is a person making a decision under their very human conditions.
Designing for humans, not dashboards
The organisations that are pulling ahead are the ones that use data to ask better questions, to dig deeper, not to close them down. They pair quantitative data with qualitative understanding. They sit in on customer calls, and actually read the verbatims. They run small, deliberate behavioural experiments rather than trusting a report to tell them what to do.
They also get comfortable with the fact that some of the most important things about customer experience cannot easily be counted. Trust. Empathy. The feeling of being listened to. A sense that someone on the other end of the interaction is on your side. These things show up in retention numbers eventually, but by then they are lagging indicators of decisions and actions made months or years earlier.
A more honest relationship with data
Data should sit at the table in every customer experience conversation, but it should not chair the meeting. The best marketers I’ve had the pleasure of working with know to treat their dashboards with a mix of respect and healthy suspicion. They know what the numbers are good for, and they know where the numbers stop adding value.
If we want to understand our customers, we will need to make space for the things dashboards cannot show us. Those small but crucial observations. The uncomfortable comments and quotes. The patterns that only become visible when you put the laptop down and actually listen to people. Think of it as focusing on causation rather than effect.
Data is powerful, but only when it is combined with human understanding. Without that, we are not really measuring customer experience at all. Curiosity of what sits behind the number is one of the most valuable attributes in modern marketing.
Footnotes
- Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Books. ↩︎
