The Most Important Metrics You’re Not Tracking (Yet)

A growing number of organizations are becoming more customer-centric by adopting, measuring, and optimizing CPIs — Customer Performance Indicators. These are the metrics that customers care about, as opposed to the ones that the company cares most about. Examples might include how fast customers can get a pricing quote, or getting a “first-time resolution” on a customer service call, or having a grocery delivery with “nothing broken.” While these examples may not be metrics that companies have traditionally tracked, they’re what customers actually care about. And by tracking what’s important to customers, companies have better visibility into actions they can take to improve customer outcomes, which directly impact business performance. It’s ironic in an age where so many companies proclaim to be customer-centric, customer-first, or customer-obsessed that most still focus only on company-centric metrics. Companies that transform to adopt CPIs — and the customer-centric culture and practices that CPIs engender — will increasingly outperform competitors and be better optimized for accelerated, differentiated, and defensible growth.