In our ROI-driven world, apparently museums are the latest organizations to assess the value they provide to visitors.  Pressed by increasingly frugal donors to demonstrate the effectiveness of their investments, museum staff are trailing art lovers through exhibits, observing them enjoy paintings.

While perhaps bizarre to some, or even a bit big brother-ish, the truth is that the service and support world can actually learn a thing or two from these art museums, particularly as relates to self-service channels. 

What these museums are examining is time spend—and using it a proxy for the quality of the visitor experience.  Too little time in a gallery (less than one minute, specifically) means a visitor is just rushing through and not absorbing much.  Several minutes could be a sign that the visitor is really engaging with the art.  Or it could indicate visitor confusion with unwieldy art descriptions.

Historically, service and support organizations have tracked upside metrics such as self-service utilization and percentage of customers on the Web.  Yet as museums have found, it’s important to examine the quality of experiences, not simply quantity of visits.  What sections of the Web site are customers accessing?  And critically, are customers spending enough time in these sections to actually resolve their issues?

We all know what it’s like to attempt to resolve an issue in self-service—endless clicking on multiple Web pages to find a nugget of information, numerous selections in IVR menus to no avail.  Since many service and support organizations are not able to observe customers struggling live, time spend is the next best metric (and it’s actually a pretty good indicator). 

For example, too little time on the Web likely means that customers are not using self-service tools.  In fact, Cisco Consumer Products finds that despite several comprehensive self-service tools available, customers spent an average of 30 seconds on its Web site, indicating that they are simply looking for a phone number to call for support.  As a result, Cisco redesigns its self-service offerings to better appeal to individual customers, increasing to six minutes customer time spend on the Web.  CCC Members, learn more about how Cisco redesigned its Web site here.

Yet too much time can indicate that customers are struggling, causing them to leave dissatisfied and perhaps switch to the higher-cost phone channel.  When Internet services provider EarthLink sees a customer spending 60-90 seconds in the knowledge base or account maintenance section of the Web site, EarthLink interprets this, along with other factors, as a struggling customer.  Accordingly, it launches a chat to save customer and keep the interaction in the Web channel.  CCC Members, find details how to operationalize proactive chat here.

So what is a good self-service time spend benchmark?  In general, any customer spending less than a minute on your Web site or less than two seconds in your IVR is realistically not resolving an issue.

But time spend can certainly vary according to issue complexity and customer familiarity—for example, you would expect customers with technical support inquiries to spend more time on the Web than a customer paying a bill—and companies should conduct enough analysis to settle on the right average thresholds.  Also consider: How long should a particular interaction reasonably take?

So what has clocking visitors yielded museums?  Several have redesigned exhibits, making frequented artworks more prominent, and even shortened art summaries to make them more consumable.  Sounds just like a page out of CCC research.

Related posts:

1. Sifting Through the Noise in Customer Data
2. Channel Choice: More Detrimental Than You Think
3. Are You A Low-Effort Service Organization?