The most customer-centric companies substitute their customers’ success metrics for their own internally-driven management objectives. Schwab measures how much the value of their clients’ portfolios has increased. Agilent monitors customers’ downtime (not just mean time before failure or how quickly they answer the phone). Delta measures how many passengers were affected by cancelled or delayed flights, and whether they (and their bags) reached their final destination within an hour of the scheduled arrival time. Harrah’s monitors whether their customers are close to exceeding their entertainment budgets, and offers them coupons as enticements to stop gambling and go have a meal or see a show.

A good way to institutionalize this practice—that of aligning your executives’ and staffs’ goals with your customers’ critical success metrics—is to refresh your customers’ success metrics every 18 months or so. These are likely to change, as customers’ expectations shift—due to competitors’ CX improvements, and due to changes in customers’ contexts. Here’s a refresher on how to identify customer-critical moments of truth, how to elicit customers’ success metrics, and how to align your operational metrics and business goals with a handful of customer-critical metrics.

There’s Gold in Those Customer Metrics!
Mine Them Well and Reap the Benefits of Loyalty and Increased Business
By Ronni T. Marshak, EVP and Senior Consultant, October 23, 2014

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