Metrics To Improve The Customer Experience

By Ivan Moore, Jolt Consulting

Famed business consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured, gets managed.” This mantra is as important today as ever when running a business, especially for the service executives when insight into metrics positively impacts the Customer Experience (“CX”).

It’s no longer viable to base business decisions on how you “think” or “feel” something is working. The answer is in the data. In fact, according to Aberdeen, executives in best-in-class organizations are 50 percent more likely than peers to access their service performance metrics and data. So, to become a leader in the service industry, properly tracking and keenly focusing on metrics provides benefits including:

• Offering executives measurable business data and insight into the impact of daily activities.
• Helping to influence business decisions based on real-time data.
• Being able to assess and adjust based on the story metrics tell about your organization.
• Influencing CX positively in real-time.

The Bottom-Line Difference

There are certain metrics service organizations should concentrate on that fall into two distinct and separate buckets – process and results-based metrics. Process metrics focus on specific areas that individuals in the service organization can directly influence (e.g., response time, travel time per work order) and are typically “task-related”; if I do ‘X’ faster or slower it will have a direct impact on the metric in question.

Results metrics are the outcomes of the processes and activities and are typically customer satisfaction or financial in nature (e.g., NPS, profitability). Jolt Consulting believes that a balance of process and result metrics provide the most insight into the overall performance of the service organization.

While results metrics will always be measured by executives, Jolt believes that the rank and file of the service organization have little ability to directly influence revenue and profit (results), so their focus should be on process metrics and that the financial metrics desired by senior management will, in our opinion, come to fruition.

Marrying Metrics And Customer Experience

Metrics can provide insight into one of the most important factors in running a successful service business – the Customer Experience. Those companies that achieve service excellence focus on improving several factors year-over-year including:

• First contact resolution rates/first-time fix rates.
• Average handle time in the contact center.
• Average response time to customer requests.

Customers have increasing expectations for service and if your business understands real-time metrics, lack of efficiencies, and addressing faux pas as quickly as possible can enable your business to manage and exceed customer expectations.

Customer satisfaction is key to engagement, retaining business, and earning positive word-of-mouth. The way to gain insights into CX and profitability is through metrics and this strategy is number one at top-performing organizations to improve both customer experience and financial results.

Conclusion

“What gets measured, gets managed.” Period. Start focusing on measuring the metrics in your service business to have a positive impact on CX gaining access to data in real-time. To start, focus on two metrics categories – process and results – the former can drive change (operational) and positively influence the latter (profitability). Recognize that metrics give your organization insight into CX – how to prevent negative experiences and enhance the positive ones, in real-time. Remember, data is the decision-making driver in today’s customer-centric world, so let the metrics lead the way!

About The Author

Ivan joined Jolt in 2013 as Chief Operating Officer working with organizations to better connect with their customers across the complete sales and service journey. Ivan has assisted companies across many industry verticals to improve their customer engagement with assessments of their sales and service delivery, optimization of business processes, operating metrics, and deployment of enabling technologies. Recent engagement includes a process and technology assessment for a global manufacturing company and leading a technology selection process for a large national HVAC company.

Citations

Aberdeen, Service Analytics: Insight into Field Performance, November 2014.

Aberdeen, Exploring The Business Impart of Service On Customer Engagement, April 2017.

Aberdeen, Exploring The Business Impart of Service On Customer Engagement, April 2017.