Bloody Metrics

Why bother with them?

Why do you have eyesight? Why do you get grades at school and university? Why does an engineer or chemist measure ingredients and impacts? The big difference between regular trained scientists and engineers and I include my jovial oncologist and haematologist in this little bunch, is that without numbers, metrics, they'd be lost and wouldn't be able to do their job.

Now I am not known for being as grumpy about CRM as much as I ought to be, so this is my first full on grumpiness displayed in public.

Metrics are what support intelligent decision making by providing some insights and reality to outcomes and causes. Metrics lower risks if applied effectively. Metrics help explore new investment. They help minimise unwanted communication to your customers, whilst acting as a luminous ray onto those things, channels, products, offers, processes, services and people that do well and not so well. Often it's the simple metrics which most people (organisations) fail to have at hand.

An exmaple of blindness is to only review revenue without associated costs. Even worse, to inaccurately record costs and or ignore the opportunity to create multiple views of metrics, so that you can discover margins and productivity amongst the myriad of combinations you may never have considered plausible, or just didn't have enough time to consider.

I am a great believer in designing all CRM and business systems in general to be as integrated as is possible, to ensure consistent and continuous measurement. Further, relationships can be viewed using the same structured truth, whether in a sales ledger, a customer history table or the general ledger. Indeed, one of the last bastions of CRM influence, yet the most obvious place to start, is the GL. I reckon more than 80% of the companies I have visited over the years has structured its chart of accounts into strict P&L and BS format to suit the accountants, not the senior management and certainly not sales. WIth PeopleSoft, SAP and a myriad of other GLs enabling multi-level account codes, there's no excuse not to automate the journals exploding from individual transactions. All it takes is some imagination and an understanding of metrics.

The real challenge of CRM experts and the market in general, isn't just getting strategy and customer centric thinking adopted, it's getting those self same people educated and disciplined just like the engineers and scientists I mentioned earlier, to interpret and act upon a wide range of metrics.

What's makes me even grumpier, is knowing that maths and metrics will be considered boring and "like too hard man". I know I can make the numbers interesting, especially when the R.O.K. is considerably more valuable than adding some more glitz to the web site or another option on the IVR.

R.O.K. is my new acronymn: "Return On Knowledge"