When it comes to running a successful business, the key goal that you should strive to achieve is pleasing your customers.
After all, with satisfied customers comes increased loyalty and enhanced profit levels. To ensure that a superior customer experience is obtained, it is vital that your KPIs are structured in a way that enables this to happen.
This means you may need to switch some of your focus away from internal KPIs — sales and productivity — and start gearing some of your focus externally. Here’s a quick look at four tips for structuring your KPIs in a way that will allow an improved customer experience to be achieved.
1) Look externally
When you keep your attention focused on productivity, you forget to assess the feelings and experiences of your customers. This means if your customers aren’t happy, you might fail to notice. You must put yourself in your customers’ shoes on a daily basis, and think like they think. This will help you pinpoint what KPIs you need to be measuring.
2) Don’t forget that internal KPIs still matter
As you look externally at KPIs, you must keep in mind that internal KPIs are still important. A good ratio is 70-30, with 70% of your focus on customer measures and 30% on internal goals like revenue and sales. Link employee incentives to customer experience rather than hard numbers to improve focus on the customer. Another thing to remember is that when looking at your internal KPIs, you should steer clear of vanity metrics — page views, Facebook likes, signups, etc. These metrics don’t offer any real substance.
3) Take into account all departments
All departments are vital to the success of your company. If you find one that isn’t, then you should probably eliminate it to reduce overhead expenditures. As for those that make the cut, it is imperative that each maintain KPIs that are customer-centric. This helps consistency to be maintained across all departments, which further enhances customer service.
4) Act on your findings
If your KPIs don’t prompt you to take action, then you are more than likely focusing on the wrong ones. KPIs should always inspire you to act, and the ones that do, tend to be those relating to marketing, sales growth and opportunities, customer feedback and product performance. However, regardless of the KPIs being measured, both internal and external KPI reports should be always produced.
Take a step back and really look at what you measure in your company. Is it all oriented around numbers or do customers take priority? Make it a goal in your upcoming year to structure your KPIs more on the customer experience, rather than internal indicators. After all, an exceptional customer experience is at the core of an exceptional call center. Get started here – check out our free interactive worksheet to evaluate your customer experience!
