Two Tips to Improve Your Success: Use More Than One Metric and Understand Why Your Customers Buy

I've had a bunch of phone calls and conversations about a recent paper I wrote called "Do you know why your customers really buy," which explores how using attitudinal data is critical to driving real business change. Based on that, I wanted to comment about two things on my mind:

There are a lot of professionals caught up in a quandary right now. They seem to be searching for a way to justify their loyalty and engagement efforts. They want to gain more ground competitively and showcase more quantifiable results to their company. They feel a bit exposed because much of what they do is "intuitive" and little is quantifiable. However, they are either not sure how to fix the issue or they are unable to get any real information to use/show.

I recently attended an industry tradeshow. I had many conversations about how to select metrics, and how to present results to other company peers and executives. This show confirmed what I have been witnessing for some time - a lack of understanding about how to quantify loyalty results.

I believe it is important to use metrics with any marketing or loyalty initiative. Many business managers use only a yearly customer satisfaction survey, exit surveys or a promoter score. Although these are good, I suggest using more. Utilize a broader spectrum of measures to get a clearer picture. At Allegiance, we deliver a handful of metrics: loyalty, satisfaction, promoter and engagement scores. These improve your read on the situation. Don't use too many though or you'll soon go crazy chasing data. You should feel comfortable about how to justify your job, get a raise and show positive economic-related results from your efforts.

You can measure churn, share of wallet, word of mouth, lifetime value, etc. The simplicity of net promoter is good because it brings the conversation into the boardroom in a way that people can understand. However, the backlash on net promoter is also deserved. It is just too simple to be the only metric to use for business decision making.

The other important item to consider when trying to justify success is looking beyond statistics and dashboards. What does the data really tell you? What decisions have you made that drive business forward as a result of having that data? Too many people say: "our net promoter score is such and such" or "our allegiance engagement index is this" and they leave it at that. A static measure only tells you half of the story.
It's good to have a point-in-time measurement, but it's even better to know what drives those scores, and build a best practice that allows you to understand what you can do to impact those scores.

For example, understanding why a customer buys the attitudinal part of the relationship you have with them will help you to really serve them better. Here's an example from my paper "Do you know why your customers really buy?":

An organization always assumed their most engaged customers were of a middle aged demographic. Through segmentation analysis, they discovered that one of their most engaged groups was their early adult group. Knowing this information, and understanding what drivers lead this group to be engaged, the company launched new marketing and product initiatives to better serve the early adult group and ensure their engagement remained high. They were also able to identify that both the early adult and middle aged groups became disengaged with the company after 2 years as a customer. They held focus groups and launched surveys to study why this happens. Knowing this information allowed them to change this pattern to impact long-term engagement and profits.

I like to talk to marketing, sales and loyalty pros about understanding the attitudinal side of relationships better. They tend to focus more on the transactional side too much. The "who, what, where, when, and how" of a relationship is important, but so is the "why." I encourage anyone involved in enterprise feedback management to seek out attitudinal information. To learn more about how to do this, get a free copy of my paper.

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