In traditional economics, there is a clear distinction between products and services. Products are tangible and consumable — clothes, cars, or televisions, for example. Services on the other hand are exchanges that are intangible and do not result in ownership. For example, medical treatment, public transportation, or insurance services. In today’s world a clear distinction between products and services often no longer exists. Rather, there is a continuum of products and services that form the larger service experience.
Many product managers are used to thinking about key performance indicators only from a product perspective. For product managers, key performance indicators (KPIs) are the strongest, defensible tool in decision making. They identify the progress of the work your team is making, as well as the progress of the product and your overall business. As product managers evolve to consider more about the service experience it is important that they adapt KPIs to respond to this new perspective. As we go non-digital the focus should expand to consider internal items (e.g. job roles and processes) and external items (e.g. delivery partnerships and vendors).
Here is a traditional model for product managers.
We can expand upon it by considering internal and external delivery metrics that are important to creating a service experience.
1. Business Performance
Product Perspective:
Tracking KPIs related to your business performance is a great way to identify the success of your business. Looking at customer counts, bookings, revenues, and market position allows you to see exactly how your business is growing and any opportunities to succeed further.
Service Perspective:
Businesses should also start to track KPIs in employee satisfaction and turnover. As your business grows, employee satisfaction is important n to continue growing.Satisfied and happy employees are more likely to bring better results to your company and are less likely to leave to pursue other opportunities. Through informal conversations, employee surveys, and looking at the data of employee turnover and productivity rates, you can begin to implement changes to boost your employees’ morale. This will help your business in the long run deliver better service experiences and grow.
2. Product Usage
Product Perspective:
When it comes to product usage, you want to take into account your customer satisfaction score to gauge how content your customer is with the product or overall experience. Users, transactions, and times to X (e.g. downloads, onboarding metrics, etc.) are all vital KPIs to track when focusing on your product usage.
Service Perspective:
For service usage, most people forget to track the cost of delivery per channel and across channels. Typical omnichannel KPIs include cross-channel conversion rate or conversion rate from visitor to customers. Across all channels, revisit frequency and length of visit are other key metrics to consider for an omnichannel platform.
3. Product Quality
Product Perspective:
Product quality KPIs showcase trends and risks when it comes to your customer experience. This is done through rigorous testing of your product — noting successful or failed tests, for example — as well as how many customer support tickets come through about your product.
Service Perspective:
The creation of a high quality service experience should be a high priority for your business. This includes taking a step further and tracking process quality. The service process can be flawed and create problems for delivering a great experience. Are you forcing front line staff to hide information or create unnatural pauses that lead to frustration for customers? If so, this could lead to customer loss and low retention.
4. Product Development
Product Perspective:
Product development KPIs can enhance your team’s and business’ energy, competitiveness, and creativity. This is done by tracking your delivery time, team velocity, and resource availability.
Service Perspective:
Do not fail to consider team availability, process efficiency, and process errors. Does your team have enough time and resources to work at a faster pace to deliver a successful product? Or would this lead to a decrease in product quality? These are all important questions to consider. It is crucial to not abandon your product quality KPIs when working on your product development so as not to upset customers with a malfunctioning service.
Conclusion
Tracking metrics highlights places for improvement in your business’s delivery of great service experiences. Both internal and external factors of your business should be taken into account when tracking your performance KPIs so that your business can grow from the inside out. Now, it’s all about what you do with that data.
If you’re interested in learning more about service and product KPIs and how they can help your business, contact us at hello@impactsignal.com to get in touch with us today.
[…] If your omnichannel business model is effective and flexible, your employees are more likely to be satisfied and happy within their jobs. Happier employees lead to more initiatives and engagement from your employees, which will eventually lead to a stronger brand and happier customers. You can gauge your employees’ overall satisfaction through informal conversations, surveys, and even observing past employee retention data. We talked a lot about the importance of employee engagement in our blog post about Key Performance Indicators which you can read here. […]