An AI-powered HiPPO with Big Ears: A Better Way to Plan

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Quite often people ask me why on earth I decided to move from my (allegedly) lucrative consulting practice to become a tech start-up co-founder and CEO, with all the hard work, heartache and risk that it entails.  Well, because I experienced for myself and saw the pain my clients went through without the time, data and directions to actually do the right strategic work that would make a difference. Not to mention the constant struggle to properly implement it and sustain success (always a challenge), but also to prove it generated the right results.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the annual planning process, currently underway at many organizations.  My last post walked through my flawed past approach to annual planning, and in this post I’ll share my learnings and abject failures, all leading to Klever Insight’s birth.

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“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

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Yes that’s an attention-getting line, famously coined by boxer Mike Tyson. But it really is something to think about, especially since it’s that time of the year for most of us – when we are neck deep in planning. A time when hope still springs eternal – *this* is surely the year when we will duck those right hooks and our fancy footwork will guide us to success. Or, when some of what we plan for gets completed rather than smashed by a flurry of incoming urgent issues.  

If you are anything like me, here’s how you would approach this task :

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Executive’s Guide to the Few Acceleration Metrics that Matter

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This is the final post in a six-part series on each of the Categories of Focus suggested by the new standard Open Customer Metrics Framework (OCMF). Learn more about this modern, open framework and its five categories of focus in my first post on this topic.

OCMF suggests that executives should spend about 10% of their time on things that make a difference — the “Acceleration category”.

You know how crazy this sounds. We barely have enough time to deal with our day-to- day (and overnight) emergencies as it is.

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Executive’s Guide to the few knowledge metrics that matter

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This is part five of a six-part series on each of the Categories of Focus suggested by the new standard Open Customer Metrics Framework (OCMF). Learn more about this modern, open framework and its five categories of focus in my first post on this topic.

OCMF suggests that executives should spend about 20% of their time on knowledge management – the “Knowledge/Collaboration category”.

For those of you keeping score at the office, this is the *same* percentage focused on customers and employees. Yes, it is that important. Your employees know this.

Klever’s State of Knowledge Sharing 2016 survey asked the following question: “If people in your workplace were sharing knowledge as well as they possibly could, it would improve productivity by:”

Nearly 50% of respondents believe that their organization could be at least 30% more productive if they shared knowledge better. Think about that the next time you think knowledge management is too fuzzy a concept to address.

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Executive’s Guide to the few ‘business’ metrics that matter

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This is part four of a six-part series on each of the Categories of Focus suggested by the new standard Open Customer Metrics Framework (OCMF). Learn more about this modern, open framework and its five categories of focus in my first post on this topic.

OCMF suggests that executives should spend about 30% of their time on the needs of the business – the “Business Category” — which we’ll walk through here.

Leading customer success and support organizations have realized that we have fixated on cost and efficiency at the expense of a superior customer (and employee) experience or the value delivered. This is one category where we should pull back on some of what we currently measure and report on, to free up mind share to think about and act on some of the other categories of measures.

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Executive’s Guide to the few employee metrics that matter

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This is part three of a six-part series on each of the Categories of Focus suggested by the new standard Open Customer Metrics Framework (OCMF). Learn more about this modern, open framework and its five categories of focus in my first post on this topic.

The OCMF suggests that executives should spend about 20% of your time on work regarding your employees – the “Employee Category,” which we’ll walk through here.

Let’s admit it. While we talk a lot about how important employees are to us, it’s appalling how little time we actually have to spend on them. After all, employee engagement is a leading indicator of financial performance[1] including customer ratings, productivity and profitability. We spend a lot more time worrying about what our customers say and think, and making sure our financials are in order (Business Category, in OCMF parlance) than we do about employees.

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Executive’s Guide to the few customer metrics that matter

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This is part two of a six-part series on each of the Categories of Focus suggested by the new standard Open Customer Metrics Framework (OCMF). Learn more about this modern, open framework and its five categories of focus in my first post on this topic.

OCMF suggests that executives should spend about 20% of their time on the needs of the customer, which we’ll walk through here.

A good measurement system:

  • is simple enough to focus attention on a few key elements.
  • is fair enough so that people at every level believe they can affect the measures.
  • facilitates an environment of learning and dialogue – not of control and compliance.

 

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Executive’s Guide to the modern metrics framework for customer success and support (OCMFgroup.org)

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The Open Customer Metrics Framework is the open, modern measurements framework that helps support and success leaders measure what actually matters.

Created by a group of award-winning practitioners and experts, OCMF is designed to facilitate an environment of learning and dialogue.  

This is the first in a series that walks through the standard, and the thinking behind it.

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Time to Smile: The new killer internal Customer Experience metric?

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While support executives have made great strides in making sure our teams think about the customer first, this way of thinking runs smack into reality when we reach across internal departments to get an issue solved for a customer. The further away you get from people who interact with customers on a daily basis, the more likely you are to go from a personal, emotional connection with a customer and their issue to an ‘escalation’ (read: interruption from my ‘real’ job) that has to be dealt with.

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Klever’s Law: Time to Customer Value

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Want to know perhaps the simplest, most powerful measure that aligns every customer-facing department with the customer? Time to Customer Value.

Here is how to calculate it.

Time to Customer Value = Time to Value (before sale) + Time to Value (after sale) + Time to Smile (after interruption).

Measured in days. If your Time to Customer Value is zero or even negative (days), you are doing really well.

Let’s break this down.

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