Measurement in the business of emotional outcomes

I am often asked this question,

“How do we measure the outcome of the services we provide? It’s not something tangible like a physical product?” “It’s not a simple construct. There are so many aspects.” ”It’s not something you can see, it’s just a feeling.”

Sounds familiar? Are you thinking about this too? May be you want to bring more structure and quality to your services business, may be you are thinking about raising funds, or showing business growth or just want to see how good you are, then this article might help you jump start the measurement process. So try the exercises as you go along.

'...taken an Uber ride recently?’

Coming back to the question I am asked, “How to measure the outcome of intangibles or services?”

My response inevitably is

“Have you taken an Uber ride recently? Yes! So do you remember rating any rides? ”

You’d not have a problem in recalling how you generally rate your Uber rides. Its a 5 star rating method. And you know for sure, that you never rate it based on how quickly you reached your destination? Your rating is always about the whole experience of the ride.

Exercise 1 - Think about all the things that made you hate an Uber trip ride or love an Uber trip? Some reasons might look like this - did the driver reach on time and at the right pick up spot? Did the driver call you multiple times or wait patiently? Did your driver ask you about the drop location? How did the car smell? Did he drive well? Did he argue over switching on the AC (esp. a problem in Bangalore)? And so on… Your 5 star rating is a summary of all these and many more factors that you FELT during the ride.

’Will you refer us to a friend?’

Let me give you another example.

Have you visited a spa or a salon and answered a small form asking you only one question -

“On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being most likely, how likely are you to refer us to a friend?”

Many service-oriented companies use this question after every service. It would be helpful to spend a minute to appreciate its beauty and simplicity. This question is a measure of customer satisfaction. It subsumes many aspects of service quality that would drive satisfaction with the ultimate aim of providing a service so high-quality that you would be compelled to tell your friends and family about it. So this question is basically asking - Are you so happy that you would make it a point to mention to others, even recommend the services? All this is done with one simple question. It’s efficient and effective in capturing your feeling - are you happy enough to recommend ? I bet that this sounds familiar to you, and so now you know how businesses gather your feedback on their services and how you summarise your experience and feelings in that star-rating system. This method is called Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Other measures

There are many other ways in which companies measure customer satisfaction. NPS is one of the most popular ones. The others are:

1. CSAT score - which is a simple rating on a direct question of satisfaction, just like the Uber ride rating.

2. Customer Effort Score - which measures the easy of the customer in using the product or service. It focuses on convenience.

3. SERVQUAL - which measures both the service and quality.

There are some other measures that organisations do track which are more business centric, strong indicators of customer satisfaction but they are indirect meaning that they have not been stated by the customers. These are internal and central to a company’s operations. These metrics are

1. Repeat purchase rate

2. Platform usage rate or frequency of use

3. Referrals

4. Gifting vouchers

In essence, your emotional response - (dis)satisfaction, (un)happiness, (dis)content, and overall experience is measurable. It’s being done.

Adding complexity - 2 more examples

You may say that measuring overall experience is not always not as simple. Well then, let’s add some more complexities. Let’s take the example of two different services whose effect on the customers and the resulting satisfaction will work in similar ways. Consider a beauty treatment say anti-tan facial program, and an energy healing counselling program. The fundamental structure of the two programs is similar in many ways:

1. both have multiple sessions over which progress will be made,

2. there will be an immediate effect after the session and a lasting effect that grows over time,

3. there is an expectation from the customer to perform some activities in between the sessions, and

4. the person giving the service influences the quality of the experience, which is true for most human-touch services.

I am quite sure, that if you have been reading so far then your need or context is also similar to these two.

As a result of the structure of these two programs, measuring outcomes in such services requires a few additional considerations:

1. immediate effect after each session;

2. the sustained effect over multiple sessions,

3. in some cases, the build-up towards independent self-care after the completion of the program, and

4. a wider range of emotional outcomes. This is where you might feel that the measurement complexity is the highest.

Service outcomes - Short and long term

Exercise 2: it might help you to sit down and think about the purpose of the services program, i.e. the immediate solution and the long term solution being sought from the services. These short term and long term solutions are the anchors of your questions. For example, in case of the anti tan program - an after the session question would be like ‘Did you feel any difference in your complexion after the session?’. After 2-3 sessions, you could ask the user “Are you seeing a sustained benefit?” In between sessions you could also do check-ins to see if the customer is able to follow the after-care or exercises mentioned. If the advice or care practises easy to follow, relevant to their case.

Service Outcomes - Emotional

Short term and long term outcomes are also deeply entwined with emotional outcomes. As as service provider you would have some idea to begin with. But easiest way is to pay close attention to the customer’s problem description when she comes in for the first time. You might also be able to identify the evolution in the needs as the customer speaks during various stages of the service. Most of the problems can be connected with these emotional needs. Exercise 3 - see which ones apply to your case) - calm, peace, confidence, poise, self love, assurance, assertion, independence, self-esteem, joy, happiness, exuberance, sense of belonging, standing out, excitement, freedom, control. All these emotions also need to be tied into your post session feedback, in-between session check ins, end of program feedback.

For example, ‘How confident do you feel about your skin health?’ ‘How happy do you feel after investing in self-care?’ ‘Did you feel in control of your emotions during the gap between sessions?’ And as an extension to this, you might ask the customer about their confidence on being independent in self-care at the end of the program.

What’s more

By now you would have a decent clarity on your business’s short and long term outcomes, the resulting emotional outcomes. You might have also thought about the junctions in the service journey when you would want to collect customer feedback and also frequency for it. So what’s more to be figured. Here is a short guide of next steps:

1. How will you ask this feedback? Paper form, on the app, on Whatsaap, etc

2. How exactly will you ask it - is it going to be a yes/no question or 3 star, 5 star or scale of 7 or 10 ratings, or more worded open ended responses?

3. How many questions will you ask at a time?

4. How exactly will you frame the question?

As a general rule, it helps to keep the survey and the questions simple and short. Remember how simple the NPS question is - ‘How likely are you to refer us to your friend?’

5. Test your survey questions internally to see if everyone understands it at all, and understands in the same way that you meant to ask? You must also see if the meaning of your questions hold across different services. For example - ‘Did you enjoy the session’ does not always work well for physiotherapy session as physiotherapy might involve mild to a lot of discomfort. So you would inevitably get a bad response to this question. “I definitely did not enjoy the pain! But the problem eventually went away.” You see how important framing is, right!

Conclusion

Measuring an intangible outcomes may seem difficult at the outset, but upon a closer look at the services we experience in our everyday lives we could see some very effective ways to solve it. Recall your recent Uber ride ratings or your last salon session experience. Customer satisfaction measurement can give you a strong starting point to think about the outcomes being driven by your services business. Tying those short term and long term outcomes with the emotional needs at various stages can give a quick framework for your intangible measurement. After that, it’s about execution - how would you actually do it.

How about that? If you still have more questions, or you need specific help on setting this up in your context, let me know. We could set up a discussion to see if there is something else that needs attention in your case.