The "right" information provides companies with a road map – it indicates what’s working, and helps them navigate through areas of underperformance. Without such a map, performance management is downright tricky, if not impossible. Indeed, with the wonders of web technology, companies now have the ability to extrapolate all kinds of useful measures – customer list growth, open rates, session time, searched items, and so on. And while these key performance indicators (KPIs) are useful, they should all relate directly to the three KPIs that matter most: 1) Sales, 2) Customer Satisfaction, and 3) Employee Satisfaction. Success in these three areas directly impacts your success as a business. So the question becomes: How well are you doing? Are you consciously managing these three KPIs? And how well are you managing them? (Okay, so that was three questions).
1) Measuring and Influencing Sales Performance: Show Me the $$$ and Show Me the Way
Regardless of whether sales are rising or declining, companies should seek to determine what factors are influencing sales. Is there something specific in your marketing efforts, your promotions, or your merchandise or service itself that’s resonating with customers? Do you have access to this information? If you don’t, the best place to find it is at the customer. Frontline employees – employees who interact directly with customers – are a largely untapped source of customer insight, and arguably the most influential PR and sales force you have. Tapping into their interactions with customers is crucial. My favourite example is this:
I ventured into a US retailer to ask a sales rep if they still carried my favourite jeans. I’d worn them for a number of years and wanted a new pair. The sales rep replied: "I don’t know why they stopped making that style – I get asked every day if we carry them." Well, I’m no math genius, but at 70+ retail stores across the country times 300+ shopping days a year times a $75 item, that’s a $1,575,000 missed sales opportunity that I bet nobody in merchandising knows about. But this sales rep does.
Retail companies should therefore find an avenue (or, even better, a WebFeat module!) that puts them in contact with in-person and online customer interactions and needs. This kind of knowledge can have a tremendous impact on merchandise decisions, and ultimately sales performance.
At the end of the day, the ultimate goal is to sell more. To sell more, you need an effective sales strategy. So what is an effective sales strategy? It’s the ability to offer products and services that meet the needs of customers, and an effective sales channel that reaches as many of them as possible. But your sales strategy will quickly become obsolete if you don’t constantly tweak it in accordance with the ultimate guideline, which is, What People Want.
2) Measuring and Increasing Customer Satisfaction: Finding and Building Brand Mavens
It’s widely considered true that the best measure of customer satisfaction is customer loyalty, because customer loyalty is most closely linked to sales. Now, "customer loyalty" is a rather nebulous term – but it’s safe to say that your most loyal customers are champions of your brand. They act on behalf of your company as sales people, ombudsmen and mavens (I have to thank Malcolm Gladwell for that one). Your most loyal customers are those people who wholeheartedly buy and influence others to buy your brand.
To me, it seems obvious that companies should make every effort to learn why customers love their brand - yet so few companies have accurate information, or even know how to find it. My utopia is a world where companies use information technology to find out and apply what they know about their best customers to their B-list customers. This is the Holy Grail of information technology: profiting from satisfying all of your customers.
3) Measuring and Increasing Employee Satisfaction: Finding and Building Brand Mavens Within Your Company
Employees are customers too. If they’re not your brand advocates (or worse, if they’re brand bashers), your company is in a heap of trouble. Like loyal customers, employees have an investment in your brand, only deeper: they are your company. The cold hard truth (and numerous studies show this) is that how satisfied your employees are, or how positive they feel about your brand, has a direct bottom-line impact on sales and customer satisfaction.
So how do you measure employee satisfaction? And how do you increase it? It’s trickier to measure and increase than customer satisfaction, but it’s still doable. The key is to give employees a channel to offer up information that will improve company performance, while reassuring them that negative answers won’t have negative career consequences. And management has to be able to freely accept honest feedback that is often times a slap in the face.
High performance is achieved when a company’s products and services, its employees, and its sales goals are all grounded in a real knowledge of what makes customers tick. In spite of our bias here at WebFeat, web technology -- information technology – allows us to gain this knowledge. The methods available today of collecting data and measuring performance are not only awe-inspiring, they’re easier and more accessible than ever. And even more exciting is the ability to decipher this data in meaningful ways, and to use it ultimately to enhance business performance. Giddy up.
For Performance Management
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KPIs – establish what’s important and a system for finding out this information.
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Email-a-Friend and eHints – provide loyal customers with the means to advocate your brand. Learn who is advocating your brand and treat them as a VIP.
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Web Analytics – learn about your customers’ online and offline behaviours and attitudes. What do they care about, and what leaves them wanting?
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Referral Sites – gain context for search and attraction.
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Survey frontline employees – learn about their customer interactions. All of them. And ask customers too. Apply what they tell you.
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Give customers personal attention – communicate with customers according to preferences and differences. See Empower.
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Train employees – ensure they advocate your brand in their work and with their voices.
Read & Learn for Yourself
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The Psychology of Persuasion: Influence. Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D.
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Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message. Ben McConnell / Jackie Huba
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Managing Customer Value: Creating Quality and Service that Customers Can See. Bradley Gale
About Andrea:
Andrea is passionate about Human Psychology and HCI. Together
with the WebFeat team, she seeks to create new strategies and
methods that can empower companies to gain intelligence about
their customers, and ultimately improve their processes, products
and services.
With 12 years of Interactive experience, Andrea’s diverse credentials include Finance, Organizational Development, and Sales and Marketing. Andrea joined WebFeat in 2000 from ICE Integrated Communications & Entertainment Inc., and has been a key driver of web strategy for such WebFeat clients as BMO Institute for Learning, Fuji Photo Film Canada, and Universal Pictures.
