Mastering Your Metrics: The Key to Scaling Customer Value
Surface actionable insights by tracking the numbers that matter most for sustainable business growth and customer retention
A really important activity in business is to clearly measure and track performance.
First, you need to “know your numbers” to understand what happened.
It’s not rocket science and all you need to do is to:
reflect on what really matters
decide how to measure it
dig out the current and historic numbers
start tracking progress over time
review and analyse performance
communicate the results
make gradual adjustments and repeat the above cycle
Putting in place clear measurement, tracking and systems for communicating results regularly is the foundation before you start optimising for performance — “mastering your metrics”.
Let me tell you a story that shows you this method used in a practice.
Picture a call centre that isn’t performing to expectations.
Despite having all the resources and equipment, highly trained staff and mature processes in place — performance was going nowhere.
Management was growing frustrated and started leaning into tighter measures and controls to boost performance.
After the end of each working day, the data analysis team would run a report on the performance on the day before. They would print the report and place it in the mail tray of the call centre manager and department heads, who would pick up the reports and review the results.
Sometimes the reports mysteriously went missing from the mail trays.
Sometimes the reports weren’t picked up.
Things changed when one person decided to make copies of the daily performance report and placed a copy of the results on each staff members’ desk every morning.
Suddenly every person who is able to directly influence the results has access to their individual results, while also being informed of the overall result for the centre.
There was no manager-employee discussion. No judgement. No pressure.
People just started asking questions naturally:
What do these numbers mean?
Are they good or bad?
How do my numbers compare to others, and versus expectations?
What can I do to improve?
This became a daily ritual and small improvements day-by-day started compounding over time. Strong individual improvements had a big impact on the team’s overall result.
The call centre manager and department managers had started taking notice of what was happening and requested that this method and way of working was rolled out across the other teams in the call centre.
These performance improvements were fully possible without the need for any additional resources, investments, restructures, strategy changes or similar.
All that we are doing is introducing a simple but effective system for making the relevant data available to the people who are in a position to influence the outcome.
Having gone through this story and case-study in detail, what other applications of “knowing your numbers” and “measuring what matters” might other businesses be using?
When I was at Heathrow Airport in London recently, I noticed something quite interesting in the international arrivals hall.
As I was keeping a close eye on the international arrivals board, there was a rotating dashboard with service key performance indicators (KPIs) right next to it.
This approach looks quite novel and interesting for a couple of different reasons:
These results aren’t just for internal review, it’s all on public display.
The KPI dashboard is strategically placed where many people will be looking.
There’s no shying away from showing the performance statuses that are ‘off-track’.
There’s a lot of different targets (10+) and the second slide doesn’t even show on here. There also appears to be grouping into different themes/categories.
Is the service KPI information reaching the designated audience?
Would a visitor who is going to pick someone up from the internal arrivals hall and looks at this dashboard be interested in service, satisfaction and hygiene ratings from the previous quarter?
Perhaps it might serve as an indicator of reassurance of high standards being kept. Although, wouldn’t the airport visitors be more interested in the live performance stats for the day rather than historic performance?
Could the display of information in the dashboard be aimed towards informing airport staff of the metrics rather than visitors?
I quite like the idea and method that is being used here, but I have more questions than answers at this point.
🤔 Is this an effective way of clearly measuring, tracking and communicating results to the people who are in a position to move the metrics?
Before we close, reflect on how today’s topic of knowing your numbers and measuring what really matters applies to your own situation:
What are the 3-5 most important KPI metrics?
How are these metrics performing vs expectations?
Who needs to know what and why?
Do other people know these numbers?
What processes and systems are required to effectively communicate the results?
That’s all for today’s newsletter!
Hope you liked it and I’ll see you next time.
MUSICAL CODA
Giving everyone direct insight into their own impact creates curiosity and accountability naturally
Visibility often drives improvement faster than control ever does.