“Score” means different things to different silos. This leaves a mess of disjointed metrics that don’t add up to a good experience for customers.
How to Tell if Your Company Has Disjointed Metrics
- Lack of clarity across the organization
- Lack of measurement of customer profitability or customer metrics. This breeds a lack of alignment around what’s important to measure regarding customers. Separate silo-specific operational objectives are created. These objectives usually don’t link the parts of the organization together to understand the net effect on the customer relationship.
- Success metrics are typically operational goals rather than customer goals that tie back to the flow of customers, the profitability of customers, and reasons for retention or defection of customers.
- Business objectives tracked at the highest levels and defining success for the company are more often than not inward looking. Typical objectives tend to be about the business outcome, not how to achieve customer outcomes.
- (And finally) The organization usually does not have a grasp on how to measure the movement of customer behavior down the relationship cycle with the company. Without someone pushing everyone together to understand how to define and measure these critical points, customer behavior will not be measured.
Cross-Functional Metrics Are Unnatural to the Corporate Machine
As a result of disjointed goals and metrics, the brand and customer profitability are eroded. Customers leave due to service failures and lack of differentiation.
An unreliable customer experience can be attributed to:
- Separate silo-specific operational objectives
- President reports by operation versus by customer group or customer experience
- Inconsistent operational metrics created separately
- Little collaboration on company wide customer objectives and what that means operationally
- Lack of comprehensive metrics
- Lack of understanding what motivates the customer to increase their purchase behaviors, company loyalty and profitability
- Lack of measurement of customer profitability or customer metrics
Take Action: Connect Disjointed Customer Metrics
Step 1. Fill out the chart with all the different metrics on people’s scorecard by silo today.
The results will give you traction on why there’s a need to unscramble the “spaghetti bowl” of mixed metrics and uncoordinated goals getting in the way of customer growth.
Step 2. Next, use the simple Kick-Start Activity.
Start with just 10 key interaction points where you can begin to connect the metrics.
Step 3. Finally… try this simple elevator speech to explain one important function of the CCO role:
“The Chief Customer Officer unites disjointed goals and metrics which drive the disjointed experiences we deliver to customers.”
Want more details? Read pages 70-72 from my book, “Chief Customer Officer.”
For many years I have been calling this sickness of disjointed metrics “silositus”, which if left untreated will inevitably lead to long term hearing disability (not hearing the Voice of the cutomer) – great article!
Very insightful, Jeanne. You always bring a fresh perspective and provocative angle to the content! Keep up the great work!