Action plans are in place in response to customer, employee and partner feedback initiatives. As a result, you are measuring increased satisfaction, loyalty and engagement among these key groups. Driving improvements in these areas has been baked into the very culture of your organization.
However, there are limitations to approaching satisfaction, loyalty and engagement as end points. Integrating business performance metrics into your feedback initiatives will enable you to leverage them to drive lasting performance improvement and bottom-line results.
Emphasize the Bottom-Line Value of Your Feedback Initiative
The core objective of your feedback program is not to drive improved survey metrics. The ultimate objective is increased business performance and improved results.
Dutifully reporting to a senior executive or business unit owner that “customer engagement scores have increased for the past eight quarters” is nice. Telling that same audience that “in this same time period, quarterly sales increases of 8%, on average, and a steady decline in customer attrition of 24% have been associated with increased customer engagement” is a much more compelling story.
Linking business performance metrics with survey metrics not only provides greater decision support to key decision makers, but also underscores the vital role your feedback initiative plays in the success of the organization.
Performance Metrics Selection
In selecting meaningful metrics for inclusion into your program, the answers to these questions should help you formulate a plan to make this happen:
- How does my organization measure success? (What are the key measures of success?)
- Who owns the metrics data? (In many cases, multiple parties may own different pieces of the puzzle.)
- What do I need to do to obtain the metrics I have identified as crucial to my program?
The typical organization has a database full of performance metrics that can be augmented to a survey invitation file. Below are just a few examples from a small sample of industries:
| Consumer Banking | Retail | Information Technology |
| Customer wallet-share | Average purchase size per visit per outlet | Total value of installed products per account |
| Branch revenue | Regional sales growth | Partner annual product revenue |
| New accounts opened | Per-store sales per square foot | Value of new products purchase by existing clients |
| Customer tenure | Employee tenure | Partner tenure |
Integrating Performance Metrics
The next step is to integrate business performance metrics with feedback results from your initiatives. As covered in my previous blog post Linking Operational Data with Survey Data, these performance data variables are uploaded to your survey database as part of the invitation process (or such variables may be back-augmented after data collection has taken place). These variables remain hidden to the survey taker and are pre-populated at the record-level (meaning each survey invite record contains unique values for each variable for maximum reporting flexibility).
Analyzing and Operationalizing Your Data
Finally, put all this data to work! This recent Allegiance blog post Analyzing and Operationalizing Your Feedback has some excellent ideas for analyzing feedback program data and using it to drive lasting, positive change in your organization.
