One of the most important things I like to speak about with teams is measuring their customer experience success. Selecting your measurement(s) from the abundance available in your organization’s first task. Once you’ve narrowed down your KPI or metric it is time to set goals, determine milestones and create your communication strategy.
I recently was engaged in a terrific conversation about how organizations can be guilty of pulling a quick change on what metric they are measuring based on the performance of that metric. You don’t like your result? The answer is not to stop or change the measurement. Here are the steps for experience metric improvement. While I focus on the customer’s experience, of course, you can use the same methods to measure other KPIs in your organization.
Step 1 is acceptance of that result. Regardless of performance, this is a true measurement of your performance. Now you can take control and make a difference to move that metric.
Step 2 is assessing where you want to be. Be realistic! Even if your end goal is significantly higher, set milestones along the way for your team to reach. Take it step by step. Don’t frustrate or alienate your employees by expecting a metric to double in no time at all.
Step 3 is to create and implement actions to move that metric. Brainstorm as a team how you can impact that metric together and better your customer’s experience. A bottom up approach can have a great effect on your customer’s journey. Your client and customer facing employees have endless insight into what your customer’s needs are.
Step 4 is to communicate these actions and goals to your organization clearly and regularly. Having a clear communication strategy of when, how and where employees get information on your metrics is crucial. Get input from your team on what methods of communication work best for them. Ensure everyone has an understanding of what and how you are trying to accomplish. Set those milestones for metric growth and communicate results consistently. Whether it be daily, weekly or monthly employees should know when and how they will receive updates on the metric.
Step 5 is the most important! Celebrate your success along the way. Ensure you are shouting and promoting the employees who are positively impacting measurements. Don’t be afraid to tweak as you go. Your team may need to reevaluate your initial plans, the goals, or the milestones based on your reality. However, any changes need to be communicated in a good way, along with the “why” behind them. Your employees will need buy-in to keep them motivated.
A clear path or vision to what you want your customer, client or patient experience to look like will be your catalyst for moving your metrics in the right direction. While we want our customer experience metrics to do nothing but improve, our customers, clients, and patients want exactly the same thing. They want a consistent world class experience and we need to give them that experience so they can share with the world.
