There’s Gold in Those Customer Metrics!

Mine Them Well and Reap the Benefits of Loyalty and Increased Business

September 23, 2021

What do your customers care about and how do they measure how well you are doing in helping them succeed? The key is capturing Customer’s Success Metrics—how much time, money, effort, etc. customers believe it would take to mitigate any showstoppers along way to their goals. Once you have your customer’s metrics, you can keep track of how well you’re doing. A byproduct of keeping an eye on how your customer’s measure you is the ability to identify new win/win opportunities for your customers and your company.

NETTING IT OUT

Customer Metrics are about how your end-customers measure how successful you are in helping them meeting their goals. They aren’t about how you measure your customers’ profitability. We call these “customers’ success metrics”.

Once you figure out what matters most to customers—their Moments of Truth—and you understand what they measure—the amount of time it takes to get something done, cost of getting it done, how hard or easy it is to get it done, etc., you can start capturing your own operational metrics. These look at how well you are executing in meeting your customers’ priorities and success metrics. You should make these operational metrics aspirational (i.e., not just what you measure, but your goal for how often you succeed). Customers crossword puzzle

If you’re measuring the right things, based on customer input and your own internal dashboards, you can discover new opportunities for reduced costs, increased revenue, and improved customer loyalty and relationships. Capturing these business case metrics help you realize how helping customers succeed can put you on the road in bottom-line success of your own!

CUSTOMER METRICS ARE NOT ABOUT YOU!

Measuring What Matters to Your Customers

Recently, we did a Customer Co-Design consulting engagement that was eye-opening in this era of customer-centricity. When we asked our client’s customer, during our standard Issues and Vision Discussion, what customer metrics they capture and value (for their end-customers), they answered, “How much the customer brought in (in revenue) and how difficult it was to serve them. Then we know if they’re worth it.”

Head spinning, we quickly explained that when we talk about customer metrics, it isn’t how you measure customers, but rather how your end-customers measure you. How well are you meeting their needs? How successful are you making them? We call these “customers’ success metrics.”

Once we explained, we were relieved that the company representatives recognized the value of knowing how their customers measure them. But, apart from standard customer satisfaction scores, they didn’t have any customer metrics in place.

END-CUSTOMER METRICS SHOULD DRIVE YOUR ENTIRE ECOSYSTEM. In this B2B customer co-design session, the representatives from the customer company (we’ll call it Company B) were our client’s (Company C’s) customers. But, of course, that customer company has end-customers, too (Company A)! During the co-design session, they surfaced their Moments of Truth (significant points in the customer journey where customers might bail out if their expectations aren’t met) during the Customer Scenario^® Mapping (CSM) exercises. So, by the end of the co-design session, they clarified not only their own priorities and how they measure them, they also understood exactly how to...(more)