“Word Nerd Wednesday” is a weekly series that uses language to help us think differently and solve old problems in new ways.
Measurement is a hot topic in every area of business, but few people think about what it means to measure something or why doing so is useful. Except me. I’ve been talking about what it means to measure customer experience, employee experience, trust, and culture for 15 years. Here’s what I’ve learned:
To measure a thing is to describe one of its characteristics in numerical form – volume, width, age, length, depth, strength, etc. Physical characteristics are easier to measure because many people can see and agree on them. Experiences and feelings are harder to measure because they are invisible and lack boundaries. Numbers are precise; life is not.
Numbers are also impartial. No metric is good or bad unless you assign meaning to it. I push clients to think about how they want to EVALUTE experiences before worrying about how to measure them. To evaluate is “to determine the significance, worth, or condition of usually by careful appraisal and study.”
Your CX Vision captures traits you deem essential to a good CX at the conceptual level. Metrics help you judge how much of each trait is present in a given situation, but the number never is and never was the point.
