What is the goal of your CRM initiative? Is it to increase revenue per sales rep, increase average order size, decrease customer acquisition costs, improve customer retention, or decrease service response times? Managers that I talk with strongly recommend defining CRM objectives and measures before making a technology purchase.
Clear metrics help employees know what “success” looks like. A telecommunications firm I know of invested millions of dollars in a customer management technology platform designed to enable service reps to better answer customer inquiries and respond to customer requests. They track five key metrics for service reps: number of repeat calls, number of topics discussed per contact, hold time, call time, and customer satisfaction. Clear measures let them know how well reps are performing and whether the technology investment is contributing to better business performance.
A sound CRM plan starts with linking CRM tactics to organization business goals, then defining measures to track progress. One senior manager told me recently, “CRM is both a strategy and a set of tools, but not just a press release announcing mere good intentions. You need to pay attention to how well you are tracking toward your goals over the long term. Define your measures of achievement carefully, in advance.”
Here are 38 CRM metrics that I use as a starting point to help Forrester clients define the most critical measures of success for their organizations:
Marketing Metrics
• Number of campaigns
• New customer retention rates
• Number of responses by campaign
• Number of purchases by campaign
• Revenue generated by campaign
• Cost per interaction by campaign
• Number of new customers acquired by campaign
• Customer retention rate
• Number of new leads by product
• Number of customer referrals
Sales Metrics
• Number of prospects
• Number of new customers
• Number of retained customers
• Number of open opportunities
• Close rate
• Renewal rate
• Number of sales calls
• Number of sales call per opportunity
• Amount of new revenue
• Amount of recurring revenue
• Time to close by channel
• Margin
• Sales stage duration
• Sales cycle duration
• Number of sales calls made
• Number of proposals given
• Competitive knockouts
Service Metrics
• Cases closed same day
• Number of cases handled by agent
• Number of service calls
• Average number of service requests by type
• Average time to resolution
• Average number of service calls per day
• Percentage compliance with service-level agreement (SLA)
• Percentage of service renewals
• Customer satisfaction level
• Complaint time-to-resolution
• Propensity for customer defection
Bill
Thank you for sharing. The metrics you define are indeed very useful.
However, CRM is about managing customer relationship, should we have a category on relationshp too?
What will be the possible relationshp metrics?
Daryl Choy
Make Little Things Count
wisdomboom.blogspot.com
According to NASSCOM, the Indian ITeS-BPO industry has entered into Phase II of Evolution (i.e. moving from potential to performance). BPO companies today are continuously posed with various challenges as well as stiff competition in their markets – be it international or domestic. The clients demand an ever-increasing array of technology products and services, while expecting highest levels of quality and service delivery. Vendors have now started looking beyond contract fulfillment to identify opportunities for delivering high quality support to end-customers, hence focusing on long term growth. They are investing in technology to ensure high output resulting in increased customer satisfaction.
While there is so much that a BPO vendor manages, here is what I feel is most important for them as a company- Customer Interaction Management.
If not less, these companies manage close to millions of customer contacts every month. Hence, they need to monitor every single interaction with the customers and maintain a centralized database simultaneously. Earlier, for outsourced projects, traditional BPO service providers used a CRM solution or related application provided by the client to handle customer interactions. Today on the contrary, they use a CIM solution featuring multiple channels of communication. This provides a 360 degree interaction capability irrespective of the channel being used. Cross-trained agents work seamlessly to resolve customer queries and handle customer interactions not only by phone but also by email, chat and SMS on 24/7 basis.
Since the cost of acquiring a new customer is always higher than the cost of retaining an old one, so implementing such a solution is indispensible.
Call centers are also focusing on deploying a Business Intelligence tool which can provide them insight into the service level metrics and other process statistics. Various parameters affecting the service levels can be controlled at the configuration layer of such tools. The analytics derived provide visibility to managers and supervisors into floor management parameters such as AHT, occupancy, shrinkage, break management, AHoT, FCR etc. This builds a competitive environment for the agents where-in they have completely access to their scorecard and performance through the tool itself. A complete drill down of parameters affecting the performance gives them an opportunity to improve on the weak areas. The supervisors and managers can also pay attention to the high performing candidates to recognize and reward their efforts in future.
Thanks
Ajay Kathuria
http://www.vcustomer.com
http://www.vcustomerindia.com
Hi all
Thank you so much for the 38 they are a great starting point – was wondering if you have any information on how they are calculated i.e what to include and what to exclude in order to get to an accurate final number
Thanks
Nico