Are you looking at the right metric to track process improvement?

When you try to improve a process, how do you choose an appropriate metric to check the effectiveness of the change? With this article, I am going to share my experience of selecting the ideal approach.

Question: Is customer satisfaction always driven by time, i.e. If a customer gets something very fast, will the customers always be happy?

Let's talk about it. Time can be a significant factor in customer satisfaction, especially in cases where customers have to wait for a product or service. Long wait times can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction, even if the product or service is eventually delivered.

A study by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) found that wait times are among the top drivers of customer dissatisfaction. Customers who have to wait longer than expected are 18% less satisfied with their overall experience. In other words, time can be a significant factor in customer satisfaction.

With this mindset, in the service industry, we tend to choose metrics such as response time and resolution time for any customer query and/or complaint.

According to Goodhart's law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

So, what happens next is to reduce the response and resolution times, the customer care representatives try to respond to the customers quickly without understanding their query or complaint. Many times, the customers are asked to raise another ticket because, otherwise, the resolution time will show an increase. However, such interactions will make the customer experience pathetic.

I have a story to share to explain my experience. In one of the organizations I worked for, there were two teams (HR operations and IT) which employees used to contact to resolve their issues.

HR Operations (focused too much on resolution times) used to reply to me many times without resolution and mark the request as resolved. If I wrote back, they would tell me to raise another ticket for my issue. It was an extremely unsatisfactory experience to interact with that team.

Then, there was an IT team where after raising the request, the executive used to contact me within one hour. The person would try to understand what was not working. The team would try to resolve the issue, and if it requires special permissions from another team(s), take the approvals and resolve the issue. The team only focused on closing the ticket after resolving the issue. Instead, after fixing the problems, the assigned executive always asked - "Shall I now close the ticket?". I felt so satisfied whenever I contacted the IT team. Anyone can argue that the resolution time for this team would be higher than the HR Operations team. However, my experience was terrific.

So, what does this story hint towards? What is the approach for choosing the right metric??What metric would you like to look at in case of process improvements?

The answer is while the process metrics can be tracked, it is imperative to look at the customer feedback rating and comments for whom the service is improvised. The customer can be internal or external. Your process can be super quick, faster than the competitors. However, if it does not lead to an engaging and satisfactory customer experience, the metric chosen for the process is an eye wash.

Another example is - Customer's online product purchase experience. While being a Prime customer, you can get the same-day delivery of an ordered item. What if you get a second-hand scratched or fake copy of your ordered item? Does the time for delivery matter in this case? The overall customer experience will be horrible.

I will conclude this article with a real-life scenario. All political parties always display some numbers related to the progress in education, employment, poverty eradication, etc. Can you trust these numbers when at the receiver end, you have not experienced any change in the people known to you? Media and news channels have the potential to brainwash, but if you think rationally, will you look at the numbers highlighted by the political party, or will you look at the differences made in the environment and lives of the people?