Manage by the Same Numbers?

Becky Carroll over at Customers Rock! posted an article about marketing and customer service that got me thinking. Now her main point is about the impact that both marketing and customer service have on a brand, especially if each communicates a different message (think about the difference between your ISP's ads and what you experience when you call them).

However, the comment that got me thinking was when she noted:

Yet too often, marketing and customer service are managed separately in a company or organization, they don’t speak to each other, and they don’t have common metrics (you know, those things that drive the behaviors?).

In the context of my previous post on managing by the numbers, this is an important addition. When subsets of an organization have the same outputs, both groups need to be managed by numbers that are based on solid and consistent methodology, clear definitions and common understanding.

But do we think of these subsets as having the same product? Think about your Line Managers and your Training Department? Both groups share employee satisfaction and productivity as metrics. Yet Training will often be judged based on units delivered, pass rates, and often 'customer' satisfaction surveys (I could do a whole post about the wholly ineffective ways that training groups 'survey' learners to determine how 'good' their training is.) Line Managers will be judged by productivity, attrition, employee satisfaction, and so on (and don't think the way these numbers are 'created' wouldn't be worthy of a few posts as well).

I think an organization that measured its operational and support groups with the same scorecards would have some very interesting results.

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Manage by the Numbers

About a year ago, I made a post decrying the way people ascribe meaning to numbers. Well it seems Tom Vander Well over at QAQnA thinks along similar lines. He is specifically looking at the world of call quality, but in my experience the flaws he points out are epidemic in today's business world.

People want to hear the number. "What's our market share percentage?" "What's our employee satisfaction index?" "What is our customer satisfaction score?" But businesses really need to know the meaning behind that number. Saying you have 100% of the market doesn't mean much if your market is for left-handed tent stake hammers. Having an employee satisfaction index of 5 is useless if the survey was conducted by managers walking around and asking employee's if they are satisfied with the company. Believing that 95% of your customers are satisfied doesn't mean much if your churn rate is 50% a month.

I believe that companies desperately need to learn to use business intelligence more effectively. The first step of that process, though, is to understand that a number only has meaning when it is arrived at by a solid and consistent methodology, is based on clear definitions that bear some relation to common sense, and when everyone using that number understands the methodology and definitions.

Otherwise, you might as well take Tom's suggestion and just use the same report forever.

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