Category: Measures
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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. …
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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…
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Metrics Myth Eight: Hold an 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…
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Metrics Myth Seven: Find Industry Peers and Benchmark Against Them
As a consultant, I find it rare to spend fifteen minutes with a capable executive before she asks me to assess how they’re doing compared with other companies. It’s a fair question: how can you know if you’re best in class unless you know how well other organizations are doing? And if you’re not yet…
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Metric Myth Six: Do an ROI Analysis Before Investing in a Major Purchase or Initiative
There’s nothing wrong with doing an ROI analysis—as a matter of fact, I think it’s a great idea. It’s just that the way that we, as an industry, typically use them is all backwards. They’re shouldn’t be a checkpoint; they’re a process. Let’s back up and define our terms. A Return on Investment (ROI) analysis…
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Metric Myth Five: There Are Good Industry-Standard Measures. Use Them.
(A quick note to start: our February KCS Foundations Workshop is filling up. If you or a colleague are interested, now would be a good time to register.) It’s a cliché that you get what you measure. So before we start picking from the standard list of reports provided by your KM, CRM, or BI…
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Metrics Myth Four: If We’re Doing a Great Job of Delivering Customer Satisfaction and First Contact Resolution at High Efficiency, We’re Doing a Great Job of Support
Because, you know, that’s what support does. Close cases. Quickly. In a way that satisfies customers. Mission accomplished; let’s grab a beer! Not so fast. This myth begs the question of why the Support organization exists. Because most of the activity, headcount, and budget are tied up in closing cases, it’s easy to assume…
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Metrics Myth Three: Managers Should Set Ambitious and Inspiring Goals
Yes, but. This is one of these partial truths where getting the details right really matters. Followers of popular business books will recall the BHAG—the Big Hairy Audacious Goal—proposed by James Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last. These goals are long-term, viewed as a long shot by outsiders, but considered possible by insiders. …
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Metrics Myth Two: Support Leaders Should Have Direct Control Over their Metrics and their Goals
“Men at some time are masters of their fates.”Cassius, to Brutus, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2. It’s almost axiomatic that we should sign up for goals only if we have control over achieving them. In Julius Caesar, Cassius berates Brutus for allowing himself to be treated as an underling; so to, conventional wisdom says…