The 5 Must Have Customer Metrics

To drive the customer action, we need traction that we’re just not getting naturally. That’s where Guerrilla Metrics (your customer metrics) come in.

Guerrilla Metrics will Simplify, Clarify, and Kick-Start the Customer Effort  

They’ll make the connection to revenue fast. Why call them “guerrilla”? Because getting them into your organization as a regular part of the discipline and conversation is a campaign you’ll need to forge.

Because the customer is not owned like a discipline, customer metrics come and go, but not much sticks. Occasionally the customer becomes a hot topic in meetings, but that thinking disappears as people return to their respective silos. In the absence of real leadership, all parts of the organization churn out their version of customer information.

• Guerrilla Metrics establish a new language for your organization so that you can consistently manage customers as assets.
• Guerrilla Metrics will give your leadership a platform to drive the customer agenda from.
• And Guerrilla Metrics will at last clarify the end game of what is trying to be accomplished with this customer work.

Guerrilla Metrics have Five Components, Which Establish a Customer Scoreboard for Your Organization

Using this simple scoreboard, you can get things started. Getting your company aligned to track these five things will let you know how well the hand wave to customers can turn to action. And once you’re measuring and tracking these, you’ll be on a strong path to drive the action ahead.

1. New Customers – Volume and Value

You may find that this is happening in a multitude of areas with possibly conflicting definitions of what it means to be a “new” customer.  The wild card here is if you have achieved alignment in how customers are classified inside your system. The part that’s not likely tracked is the quality of incoming customers. This is especially important as the market becomes more saturated and the pickings for customers are harder to come by.  

2. Lost Customers – Volume and Value and Reasons

The volume and value of lost customers needs to be paired with the new customer information to lay out the true situation for your company. You’ve got to reconcile customers in with customers out to know what kind of job you’re doing with managing customers as an asset of your company. In addition to knowing which customers left, you need to know the reasons why they don’t care to do business with you anymore. Without knowing or caring about this, the organization misses a massive opportunity to galvanize people into taking action.

3. Renewals with Reasons

For this to have relevance for your company, you’ll need to define renew according to your business model. The key is to understand the patterns of your customers and see which ones are loyal to you based on their continuous purchase habits with you. By flagging and attaching these data to customer records, you will know what this trend is.

4. Revenue and Profitability by Customer Group

Getting to this classification of customers is not a trivial project but is critical to getting Guerrilla Metrics up and running. What you want to do with this is show the movement of customers from one group to another. You also want to see your costliest customer group declining and your most profitable customer group showing signs of growth. This will take some time to accomplish, but stay the course. Having this information is a key ingredient in the optimum effect of Guerrilla Metrics within your organization.

5. Referrals by Customer Group

If your customers are willing to stick their neck out vouching for you, they are truly powerful to the potency of its revenue stream down the line.  Keeping these customers, growing them and developing other customers like them is the key. You need to know how far you are down this path of building a customer base who would refer you.  Because if you can track the rate of referrals in general and by customer group, you’ll know the strength of your ongoing revenue stream before you even spend another dollar on marketing. The examined company will also understand why customers aren’t referring them and how the referral rates differ by customer group.

Take Action:  Get started by reviewing which of these metrics can start more formally tracking, trending and sharing across the organization.

Then, once you have at least one Guerrilla Metric collected start sharing it at the start of your weekly staff meetings. Start socializing these numbers and referring to them regularly in meetings, in one on one sessions as this helps the process get going.

Want to Establish Guerrilla Metrics for Your Company?

Read Chief Customer Officer to learn more.

Contact Jeanne to learn more.

CustomerBLISS offers consulting services to work with you to identify what you’re measuring today and other key elements important to Customer Executives.  From there, we help you to create a reality-based plan for driving customer profitability based on what will actually work inside your organization. (Imagine that!)