How To Apply The Principles Of Effective Metrics

By Israel Lang, Executive Consultant, HTG Peer Groups

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the “Quest for the Holy Grail of Metrics” (part 1 and part 2). In that post, I talked about some principles that I recommend using to build a set of metrics to help in three critical areas. Those areas are customer satisfaction, profitability, and employee engagement.

There are key lag measures in each of those areas that should be measured by almost everyone in the technology solutions provider business. These include response and resolution times, utilization and effective rates, and W-2 multiple, to name a few.

However, what we often miss are the lead measures that predict the outcome of the lag measures. Lead measures are both predictive and influenceable. Chris McChesney and Sean Covey do a great job talking about these concepts and principles here and here.

So, let me give you three examples of how to develop lead measures that can impact some of the common metrics we all measure.

First, let’s talk about customer satisfaction. Many organizations I work with use a process called Net Promoter Score (NPS). I am not going to go into that system today; but for the sake of this article, we will discuss a hypothetical company called Acme Corp. 

Let’s say that Acme Corp’s NPS scores have been trending lower. Many times organizations will look at response and resolution times or first call resolutions as things that might impact customer satisfaction. The managers at Acme come to the conclusion (and I agree) that those are generally lag measures.

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