Aberdeen on Metrics and Customer Satisfication
With IT under growing pressure to provide better value for money and to “support the business,” a new report from Aberdeen Group makes interesting reading.
The analyst has found that most companies are trying to devise a set of incentives for employees, founded on metrics, to help improve their levels of customer service. Aberdeen cites Sears and Time Warner Cable as working on this.
Aberdeen continues, though, that many companies are actually falling short in their goal, and struggling to manage service performance.
Aberdeen’s findings are important to those in application development because IT is increasingly being regarded as something that must also deliver good customer service. IT has a tougher time than someone in sales or in a call center though, because it invariably serves two types of customers, rather than just one. IT’s customers can be end users inside the employer company (where the IT shop acts as the service provider) and users of the employer’s products. People like Sears and Time Warner are invariably focused on just serving external customers, with retail products or cable bundles and services.
We at 6th Sense Analytics are in the business of real-time analytical metrics - in other words, we deliver the metrics organizations will use to measure performance of IT in dealing with internal and external consumers of our work. Metrics, though, are just one half of this story when it comes to measuring performance. Once you have the data, the question then becomes: what do I do with these metrics - and that’s where companies are struggling.
While Aberdeen is not talking about our own area specifically, the analyst does make some recommendations that people working with metrics should bear in mind when sifting data and devising those performance benchmarks. Here are four good points:
Pick the right key performance indicators
Align individual stakeholder goals with the organization- and corporate-wide goals
Lay a solid and predictable foundation with the service contract
(Importantly) don’t lose sight of the customer experience.
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