Stop Measuring What's Easy

I think there’s a sense that historically businesses have been measuring things that are easy to measure because it feels like there’s insights that we’re not getting out of that basic data.

So many just grab the information that’s easily available. Let’s just look at:

• Tickets closed divided by time
• Unhappy people divided by total tickets
• Averaging the differences between pairs of timestamps

For me the theme of the moment is having a much more nuanced approach to data. There are plenty of better measures of success than CSAT and NPS.

Think of them as your backstop measurements. A sanity check. A fire alarm. Absolutely not the start and end of your understanding.

The Power of Visibility

Does every business know that the quickest way to improve a metric is to expose it to everyone in the company.

If you are frustrated that your customers are not happy enough, then perhaps you’re not telling enough people internally that your customers aren’t happy enough.

Unhappy with some key metrics? Looking to boost the pace?

Put that headline number on a massive TV screen Or maybe post it every hour on the general Slack channel

You know what? Measuring the data improves the data. You’re not going to hit a target you’re not looking at. If you want to drive really fast, you’d better be looking at the road ahead. Know what good looks like, then point the whole business at that excellence.

AI Products and ROI

I’m not a big advocate of these AI products, but there are times where they can reveal insights.

Where you’re integrating these products into your own systems, you do need to measure your results. What are they achieving here? What are they achieving compared to expenditure on other things?

If you are going to be bringing in AI products, you need to already have this concept. What does good look like? What does success look like?

That really is the guiding principle of everything we do.

The Core Goal of Support

Does it achieve more with less? That’s always the goal of support - to achieve more with less.

We do not want to be soaking up more and more of the business’s money providing support when the demand increases.

We need this to not scale linearly. We need it to get cheaper to serve more customers.

And part of this is always going to be tooling and products.

But on the other hand, just pouring on products without knowing what success looks like here, how we’re measuring results, this is not a great way forward.

Products are condiments. If you’ve cooked a great meal, a drop of some sauce and a little grind of pepper can really bring it together. If you burned it all, drowning it in ketchup won’t solve your problems.

The businesses that we speak to - they have this insight: you’ve got to have an eye on where you’re going. What are you looking to achieve?

That’s the best way forward.