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Customer Service: 5 Basic Performance Measures
Measure #1 is customer satisfaction. This first is
probably the most important of the 5 basic measures. It's the
only measure that will connect you with the relevance of the
work you're doing. If customers aren't happy, then everyone is
wasting at least a portion of their time. Measure how your
customer judges the outcome of your product or service, through
surveys or at the end of each transaction with the customer. You
can ask them directly, give them a survey form, or send them to
a website form. If you also collect data about what aspects of
your product or service are most important to customers, it will
give you clues about more specific things that might be
important to measure also e.g. easy access to support staff or
accuracy of bills.
Measure #2 is product/service defects. Defects is a
measure of quality, and a translation of what the customer
expects your product or service to do, into something you can
count to assess how often the product or service actually does
what is expected.
Your customer satisfaction measure is a companion to this one.
And the extra data collected about what is most important to
customers about your product or service will help you define
what constitutes a defect (e.g. something breaks, something
doesn't operate correctly, a delivery deadline was missed, an
invoice has errors).
Measure #3 is cycle time. The time it takes to produce or
deliver your product or service for your customer is a
surprisingly useful thing to measure. It's not just about
meeting the time commitments you made to your customer. It's
just as importantly about focusing everyone on the things that
make the cycle time what it is. And this is usually dead time
between hand-offs in the process, waste and rework due to errors
or lax standards, and even things that didn't need to be done at
all. An alternative or companion measure to cycle time might be
on time delivery, which links it more to the customer's
experience. Just remember the value of measuring cycle time for
internal benefit too.
Measure #4 is productivity. Productivity is a measure of
your process efficiency, and is essentially the rate at which
you can produce outputs, relative to the input it takes to do
so. A great measure to focus you on eliminating waste and rework
in delivering your products and services to your customers. For
example, one way to think about productivity is to compare how
much you're producing relative the time it takes, such as number
of work hours. Another way to think about productivity is about
quantity versus cost - how much are you producing, relative to
what it costs in resources and labor.
Measure #5 is innovation (or improvement) ideas. Even if
you're not ready to call it innovation (call it improvement
instead), this fifth basic measure is about stimulating one of
the behaviors that support a performance culture, namely making
active suggestions about how to improve performance.
Particularly when the first 4 basic measures are shared and
discussed among the team, actively measuring something as simple
as the number of improvement ideas suggested, or the number of
targeted improvements tested or implemented, encourages everyone
to deepen their understanding about performance, and how they
can influence it. The 5 basic measures are a springboard, not a
solution Remember; don't try to get it perfect before you begin
measuring anything. It's not until you start using measures that
you discover new questions and clearer information needs. Use
these five basic measures as a springboard to get used to
measuring and through their use, get closer to understanding
what you really do need to measure.
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