Your people should be judged by metrics that matter.
When it comes to data, too much can be, well, too much. We understand the need for extensive research on customers, markets, and other information that provides actionable business insights, but when it comes to measuring your people’s success, it’s important to focus on metrics that matter. Often, we see a significant lack of alignment between the big-picture goals of an organization and the way individuals are measured. When this happens, the intent of the goals is lost by the time it reaches the individual, who finds it hard to answer the question, “What does this mean for me?”
Outcomes measure success, not activities.
Most of what we use to measure service success involves activity-based measures. An activity-based measure, such as creating a certain number of knowledge-based articles each week, is easy to measure but also easy to manipulate. However, it can be challenging to measure outcome-based achievements, such as “build customer loyalty,” so organizations frequently judge employees on the number of transactional tasks they perform over a period of time, as opposed to the value they contribute to the organization’s overall goals and performance.
Klever Insight brought together a group of strategic, award-winning practitioners and industry experts to create an open, industry standards measurement framework – because none existed, and that pain was felt by all. The Open Customer Metrics Framework is the open, modern measurements framework that helps support leaders measure what actually matters. It is the standard on which the Klever Insight platform measures its customers’ progress toward goals.
What’s your average time to competency?
Similarly, we’ve based “success” in the Klever app on what we call “time to competency.” In our world, that is the amount of time it takes for tech support employees to prepare themselves to work directly with customers, without supervision. Getting this measure right is important because it reduces the stress on the employee and team and improves the customer experience. And while this measure has traditionally been judged by an employee passing a battery of tests, we are drawn to the model based on the scorecard of the Open Customer Metrics Framework (OCMF). Essentially, the single most important measure of trust in a team-based environment is your peers trusting you to work independently.
“Time to Competency” is a powerful meta-measure. So many other issues must be addressed in order for this measure to improve:
- Knowledge-sharing and collaboration among team members
- A shift from a command-and-control structure to a team-based environment, where they hold each other accountable
- Team consensus on what “time to competency” means to them