Editor’s note: Bruce Temkin is managing partner of Temkin Group, a Boston-based CX research and consulting firm. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared under the title, “CX myth #3: You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
CX myth No. 3: You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
What’s wrong: When people talk about CX, they often repeat a popular saying, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” That’s just not true. Most of the things we manage in life don’t have a formal measurement. Every day we wake up in the morning, get dressed and get to work – all without any specific measurements. The same is true at work, and with customer experience. If we see an employee make a client upset, we don’t need a score on a customer survey to know that it’s a problem.
What’s right: We should say, you can’t manage what you don’t understand. Unfortunately, leaders sometimes just slap measurements on CX, which leads to the suboptimal approach of blindly managing by the numbers. When you talk with customers and employees about different aspects of customer experience, you can often discover insights that either never show up in your measurements or appear long after you should have known about them. Ideally, you use CX measurements to enhance your understanding, not to replace it.
What you should do:
- Increase leadership CX IQ. If you want leaders to be less metric-centric and more successful at driving an organization toward becoming more customer-centric, then those leaders need to have a clear and consistent view of how a customer-centric organization operates.
- Prune metrics. Since leaders are often enamored with metrics, they tend to track a larger number of them over time. The growth remains unfettered, as very few organizations have a good approach for stopping measurements once they’ve been created. Every year or so companies should have a metric cleansing period, during which time there’s a proactive focus on removing metrics that have not recently provided demonstrable value.
- Prioritize qualitative research. The push to metrics often causes organizations to put most of their marketing research budget on quantitative studies that result in trackable measurements. But deep insights into customers often come from qualitative studies that examine why customers think and behave the way that they do. Look for places to explicitly fund more qualitative studies by cutting back on the least impactful quantitative studies.
- Measure collective results. CX success requires efforts across an entire organization. So watch out for measurements that isolate the activities of individual people or teams. The narrower the measurements you use, the more likely you are to de-incentivize collaborative behaviors. Focus on metrics that capture real-world, team-based activities.
- Look for leading indicators. Most metrics represent backwards-looking scorecards, describing how an organization performed in the past. While a retrospective view can be helpful, it’s more valuable to understand what activities will impact your organization’s future CX trajectory. Use predictive analytics to identify what activities with different customer segments will most improve your CX metrics in the future.
The bottom line: CX insights don’t always require CX metrics.
Interested in learning more? Check out CX myth No. 1 and No. 2.