Increasingly, companies are running the numbers and discovering that they ignore customer experience at their peril. It’s more cost-effective to keep the customers you have, compared to the effort needed to attract more. Some put the estimate of new customer acquisition costs at 5x-25x greater than retention costs, depending on industry (Harvard Business Review).
According to a Bain & Company study, companies that excel at customer experience have seen revenue grow 4%-8% above their market average. Of course, excelling in customer experience is far easier said than done, and the stakes are high. In a PWC survey, 32% of customers said they would walk away from a favorite brand after just one bad experience.
Watch the numbers…but which numbers?
Organizations, and marketers specifically, are overwhelmed with massive amounts of data. Certainly, knowledge is still power, but the breadth of statistics available today run the risk of subjecting staff to a “drinking from the firehose” level of information overload. According to Qlik’s U.S. Data Literacy Survey, most business decision-makers aren’t confident in their ability to work with data complex data.
The first step to better analysis is narrowing the field. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) should not be set and tracked just because they can be measured. The key to efficient, sane reporting and decision making is picking the right KPIs.
Here are some tips:
1. Keep your KPIs SMART – Strategic; Measurable; Actionable; Relevant; and Time-based
Take a hard look at each KPI ) in turn. If they fail one of the above criteria, you may not need to jettison them completely, but you may want to reframe them so they work.
2. Keep your KPIs to a short list
The more KPIs you’re tracking, the harder it is to keep your eye on each of them. Keeping to fewer than 10 at a time can protect your attention from being spread too thin.
3. Have a plan for the results
When your KPIs are tracked, what are you going to do about them? You don’t need to know exactly what you’re going to do at this point but think about how you’ll employ what you learn.
Deciding now on some basic ground rules for how you’ll respond to specific kinds of results can help you spot problems with KPI framing before you start actively tracking.
4. Decide on the who and the how
Don’t be left holding a bag of numbers, decide now whos has responsibility for assessing and planning based on each KPI will be. To help make this job easier, come up with a plan for visualizing the data. Implementing a system of dashboards so people can watch trends in real time, dig into the details, and more easily pass gleanable results to non-experts can go a long way.
There’s a lot more to know before starting your KPI revolution
You can do this, and here’s everything you need to start. We’ve got specific KPI recommendations (definitions, reasons, and actual measurement methodologies), check point positioning, and a whole lot more to show you.
Download the Customer Experience KPIs eBook.
