If you were to ask people, “Do you have metrics around customers?” the answer you’ll frequently get is a resounding yes!
The problem is that there are multitudes of metrics created separately across the organization. At the end of the day, they don’t aggregate up to send a message about how to treat customers or manage their profitability. And because there’s no real clarity about which ones are important, leaders lack a clear platform for driving behavior change and focus on customers and customer profitability.
People go where they smell the green and where they feel the glory. But glory around customer performance is just not very common. Leaders don’t think to ask regularly for key customer growth metrics (customers coming in, customers going out, and the net effect). They don’t hold up exceptional examples of customer leadership and applaud the performance. Rarely does anyone bring the silos together to truly define what they will mean to customers and how they will deliver it with actionable and accountable metrics. These actions are all too often considered to be extra work to the running of the business.
Integrating customer-focused compensation, recognition, and reporting on key metrics is spotty at best inside most corporate machines. Although getting to this state does take work, I can’t identify one organization where focus on the customer wasn’t embraced by the organization once they saw that executives were serious about it with money, resources, and the firepower of accountability and personal passion.
People inside organizations want to be a part of a company that has a significant positive impact on the customers they serve. What I have seen is usually a collective “Finally!” when people see the metrics and money finally line up with mouthing the words of customer commitment
