RSS“You cant improve something if you cant measure it”. You might have heard this saying before, and might have even acted on it. But before taking it to heart, you need to ask one more question “Is this something worth measuring and improving?”.
There are many examples in any number of industries where something that is taken as granted as being really important to measure and improve actually has very little impact on the bottom line.
A good example of this can be found when thinking about what is important to measure and improve in a call centre. A typical measure used in many call-centres is “Grade of Service”, or the the percentage of calls answered in a certain time, usually 20 seconds or similar. Whilst it is great to set a target for answering a certain number of calls in a given timeframe, a better measure for a call centre might actually be the abandoned call rate (the number of calls that are not answered at all as the caller hangs up), given that if a call is answered, even if its after 15 mins, as long as the query is handled well the customer will most probably go away satisfied.
A Twitter conversation yesterday (thanks @docbaty) gave me another good example, customer satisfaction. It is almost taken for granted in most industries that improving customer satisfaction will improve the bottom line of the company. However, a number of studies have shown that this may not be the case. Instead, measuring other factors, such as the number of customers who would act as advocates for your product or service, might be a better pointer to success.
I’ve only listed a couple of examples here that are top of mind, and I’m sure there are many more. Add your examples to the Comments…
