KPIs and dashboards have such a reassuring effect. They give the impression that you’ve got the business under control: every tiny movement is recorded. The traffic light is green, so everything’s fine. The figures, with their decimal places, look so precise.
But appearances can be deceiving. I recall numerous conversations with report users where it quickly became clear that they didn’t know what the key performance indicators actually meant or how they were calculated. Conversely, many data experts have just as little idea of what decision-makers actually need. As a result, reports are produced ‘just in case’, even though their usefulness as a basis for decision-making is questionable.
What is going wrong here? Or rather, how can we tackle this issue effectively?
I believe that an open dialogue between data experts and report users is the crucial building block for first developing a shared understanding of motivations and needs. Creating a report is not an end in itself: data and key figures are needed to steer the business both operationally and strategically.
I therefore usually start with the following three questions:
- What decisions do you make on a daily basis?
- How can data support you in this?
- Which processes do you want to manage proactively, rather than simply reacting to them?
How does this work in practice? I’ll show you using the example of Customer Success Management (CSM).
The aim of Customer Success Management is to help customers achieve greater success through specific support, thereby securing customer loyalty and growth in the medium and long term. To ensure that Customer Success Managers do not lose sight of their customers and take action before problems escalate, or as soon as positive trends emerge, we need to define the following:
- Which events trigger alerts for Customer Success Managers?
For example, changes in usage intensity, increased support volumes, commercial metrics
- How are such occurrences reflected in the data? Do I need additional data sources, if necessary?
- What should be done once the event has occurred?
A designated Customer Success Manager contacts the customer to avert negative consequences for the business and to capitalise on positive trends.
Once these questions have been answered, individual metrics and their combinations are developed, and an alert system is set up.
It’s not just customers we need to keep an eye on! Life doesn’t stand still; Customer Success Managers gain new insights every day. There’s nothing more frustrating than figures based on outdated assumptions! After all, at best they’re useless and, at worst, harmful. Regularly reviewing metrics and alert strategies maintains the dialogue between business and data experts and ensures that the metrics always remain up to date and meaningful.
The content varies from sector to sector, but the approach remains the same.
Identifying and discovering the requirements and needs of report users transforms key performance indicators and reports into a dynamic tool that enables data-driven decisions.