Quality of Experience (QoE)

Every aspect of consumers' interactions with a brand influences whether or not they're happy with their overall experience. And the brands that have the highest levels of customer satisfaction take a holistic approach to managing the various factors that impact their audience's quality of experience.

What is Quality of Experience (QoE)?

Quality of experience (QoE or sometimes QoX) is a comprehensive measurement of customer satisfaction levels. It considers everything from consumer personalities and moods to the quality of the product itself — including whether or not it lives up to customer expectations.

Brands that deliver on expectations create the best experiences and have happier customers. According to Mohannad Ali, CEO of Hotjar, that's because it makes customers feel understood and creates "a sense of trust and brand reliability." And that means customers have a better quality of experience and are more likely to remain loyal brand supporters.

Quality of Experience Vs. Quality of Service Vs. User Experience

Quality of experience, quality of service (QoS), and user experience (UX) are all measurements of customer satisfaction. But QoE is the most comprehensive of the three metrics — QoS and UX both fall under its umbrella.

• Quality of service is an assessment of customer experiences with the work that a brand provides. It includes both digital services, like a monthly Netflix subscription, and human-provided services, like customer support. QoS is particularly important for subscription-based businesses like SaaS enterprises and phone companies. Because these companies rely on an interconnected network to provide services, failing to monitor service elements like network speed can have a drastic impact on the customer experience.
• User experience describes how users perceive their interactions with digital platforms like websites and mobile apps. UX is a primary focus for app developers and web designers, who need to ensure their products are user-friendly to make customers happy.
• Quality of experience considers all of the factors that influence QoS and UX. But it is the only metric that accounts for intangible factors that influence consumer satisfaction, like buyer expectations for a product. And it's a vital measurement for every business that provides a service or sells a product to customers.

3 Factors That Influence QoE (+ How to Maximize Their Impact)

If brands want to understand what their customer's quality of experience is and improve it if necessary, they need to assess every element of the experience. There are three key factors that influence whether a customer's experience is positive or negative: 

1. Proactively Set Realistic Customer Expectations

Every individual is unique. And who each customer has an impact on their own quality of experience. That's because demographic characteristics like age heavily influence things like cognitive ability and inform the level of instruction a user will need to use a product or maximize the value of a service. Meanwhile, factors like how much an individual knows about a brand before they become a customer will influence what they expect from the product or service. And if brands don't live up to those expectations, they can't provide a positive quality of experience.

Unfortunately, many of these factors are outside of a business's control. That means creating a good customer experience requires a proactive approach:

• Conduct market research to understand who the target customer is, including demographic details like age, gender, and income level. This research makes it easier to identify what customers' needs are and understand how to best meet them.
• Create customer personas that create more context for what the customer experience looks like. Including details like whether a customer intends to use a product for personal or professional purposes can help.
• Use marketing to raise brand and product awareness. The more individuals know about a brand and its products before they become customers, the more likely they are to have realistic expectations for what their experience will be like. And that makes it easier to live up to those expectations and deliver a great customer experience.
• Lean into focus groups before officially rolling out a new product or making updates to a service offering. Focus groups provide an opportunity to get valuable feedback about the quality of experience and whether or not it delivers on customer expectations.

2. Improve System Accessibility

Consumers have the best possible experience when they have access to the highest-quality version of the product or service they're paying for. But the quality the customer experiences in the real world will depend on the systemic tools and resources they have. And improving system accessibility can help mitigate the impact of issues like poor network connectivity.

Just take mobile banking as an example. An individual might use their mobile banking app to fill out an application for a new credit card. Let's say they can't submit their application when they've completed it because they have a poor cellular connection. If they have to restart their application later to resubmit it, potential customers might not want to go through the hassle, and the bank will lose business. But if the app saves their progress offline, connection issues are much less likely to bother credit card applicants.

Some of the media and system factors that influence the customer's experience include:

• Encryption method
• Jitter
• Latency
• Operating system
• Network connection
• Video freeze rate

Some of these factors will always be out of your business' control — including customers' home internet speeds. That's why Netflix viewers with Gigabit internet speeds will almost always have a higher quality of experience than those with a poor connection that causes issues like buffering.

Fortunately, brands do have control over how to package and deliver products and services. And that means they can address many potential system issues and circumvent them before a small problem hurts the customer's QoE.

For example, ​​major broadband providers will often put Netflix content servers within their own networks. These store copies of Netflix's most popular shows and movies, meaning that when the customer attempts to stream a popular title, the data has less distance to travel, reducing internet congestion.

3. Allow for External Influences

Environmental and interpersonal factors have a subconscious effect on customer mood that influences the quality of experience at an individual level. This includes everything from the physical location where customers interact with a brand to the number of interruptions throughout the experience. And while these might seem like small and unimportant factors, they can have a big impact on the customer experience.

In fact, research shows that even something as simple as a messy room can have a negative impact on mood. And that means customers who are behind on household chores are less likely to have a positive brand experience than those who are typically very tidy.

Unfortunately, there's no way to prevent a customer's bad mood from impacting their experience. But maintaining brand consistency can help minimize the risk. Customers like knowing what they can expect from a brand. And when a brand consistently delivers on those expectations, customers are less likely to take their bad day out on the brand. In fact, one study found that 77% of customers will remain loyal to a brand after a poor experience as long as the brand offers support and addresses complaints with empathy.

How to Measure QoE

There is no singular measurement for quality of experience. It's difficult to measure because there are so many factors influencing QoE, and responses will vary from customer to customer — some customers are easier to please than others. Instead, you'll need to survey your own customers and look at a variety of human-centric metrics to form a holistic picture of how customers perceive their own experience.

To understand how customers feel about their experience, it's important to monitor subjective metrics like:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Scores focus on customer experiences with specific products or interactions as a short-term metric. Brands measure CSAT by asking consumers to rank their own satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 representing the highest level of satisfaction. And calculating what percentage of respondents answered with a ranking of 4 or 5 will give the CSAT score.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a way to assess long-term customer relationships with brands. NPS measures customer sentiment by asking individuals how likely they are to refer a brand to a friend. Respondents use a numeric system — with 1 being least likely and 10 being most likely — to answer the one question. Then brands calculate how many customers would promote their products or services to gauge QoE.

It's also important to look at objective metrics that provide visibility into what customers' real-world experiences are like. And the best way to do that is to monitor and randomly measure things like:

• Average handle time
• Audio quality
• Customer churn rates
• First response time
• Signal strength
• Service transmission quality
• Task completion rates
• Total number of support requests per customer
• User adoption rates
• Video and picture quality

Frequently Asked Questions