We were at an industry conference a couple of weeks ago where we saw a lot of dashboards. Dashboards were in every presentation. Every vendor demo featured at least one. There was enough red, yellow, and green all around it sometimes felt like midtown Manhattan at rush hour. This bothered me, and I wasn’t sure […]
Measures
Customer Effort Score (CES): The One Best Question for Transactional Surveys
We recommend replacing your CSAT question with a Customer Effort Score (CES) question. Unlike CSAT, CES measures things that are largely in your control.
How to Measure Social Media for Support
It’s great that we can communicate through social. But it raises a question: how do we measure the effectiveness of social media for support?
Lowering the Cost of Failure
Yesterday, as I was driving near DB Kay & Associates “World Headquarters” in Santa Cruz, I noticed a home-painted smart car. I wasn’t quick enough with my camera to take a picture, but it looked kind of like this. Pretty cool, right? Kind of fun? I actually imagined a family afternoon with paint brushes or […]
Feedback: Style Matters! Allscripts Does It Right
Reports are boring. Can we all agree on this? Sure, reports may contain interesting information. But there’s something deeply stultifying about the actual presentation of the data in commercial reporting packages. With apologies to my friends at business intelligence vendors, it’s almost as though the designers had set out to create bad “before” examples for […]
What Do We Do About All Of These Myths?
Goodness me, listen to me go on about these metric myths. If you’ve made it this far, you can be forgiven for asking, “That’s all fine, but what do I do about it?” Metrics exist in a context, and that context isn’t going to change itself just because some consultant writes a few blog posts. […]
Metrics Myth 11: Any Initiative for Which You Can’t Define Clear Outcomes Isn’t Worth Doing
This is another inference from “you get what you measure.” If you don’t know how to measure an initiative, you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve. And if you don’t know why you’re undertaking an initiative, you shouldn’t do it. Fair enough. But isn’t it sometimes the case that we have an intuition that […]
Metrics Myth 10: Contact Deflection = Clickthroughs Times the X-Factor
Industry surveys ask. Colleagues ask. IT asks. Executives ask, incessantly. “What’s your contact deflection rate?” Let’s leave aside for the moment that contact deflection isn’t the primary reason to expose your knowledgebase to your customers. Let’s also leave aside the fact that it’s both practically and philosophically difficult to count things that didn’t happen. (Do […]
Metrics Myth Nine: NPS is Whatever I Say It Is
I’ll just say it right now: I love the Net Promoter Score. It may not be perfect, but in my experience, it’s the most powerful tool that Service and Support executives have to demonstrate their value to the entire enterprise, become more strategic in how they think about their organization’s mission, and focus the entire […]
Metrics Myth Eight: Hold a Weekly Ops Review Where Changes are Scrutinized and Punishments are Meted Out
Operations Reviews, or ops reviews, are common management tools in Support organizations. If you’re going to measure something, goes the logic, it’s best to act on those measurements. Making course corrections sooner means that things get fixed sooner, with less customer impact. Bad habits don’t have time to take root. Quick, decisive action at a […]
