Achieving Customer Enthusiasm | A Simple Model for KPI Excellence

Customer satisfaction is a losing proposition. Satisfied customers are not loyal customers. They are not necessarily customers that want to do business with you and they are not customers that are going to propagate positive word of mouth referrals.

Instead, you need enthusiastic and delighted customers because that is an indication that they genuinely believe in what you’re doing and they are willingly going to you for Service and Support.

MetricNet’s simple model for KPI excellence, shown in Figure 1 below, includes 4 components all arrayed around the central objective of customer enthusiasm.

Figure 1 | A Simple Model for KPI Excellence

Measurement | World-Class Service and Support organizations follow a common pattern when it comes to performance measurement and management. They understand the key correlations and cause-and-effect relationships that exist between KPI’s. And they realize that less really is more when it comes to communicating performance to stakeholders within their organization.

Diagnosis | Diagnosis is all about benchmarking. It begins by comparing your performance with the performance of a benchmarking peer group. You then use the information gathered to determine how best in class achieve superiority. Only by knowing and understanding what the superior organizations are doing are you able to adopt selected practices of best in class and ultimately build a sustainable competitive advantage.

Prescription | Developing an action plan to close performance gaps is a critical part of the benchmarking process. To close the performance gap, MetricNet uses a tool which identifies the KPI, sets a performance target for that KPI, identifies key drivers along with their individual performance targets and then outlines a prescription based on industry best practices. An example can be seen in Figure 2 below. When developing your action plan, do what’s realistic in the near term and remember – EVERY action should reduce costs, improve the quality of the customer experience, or both!