Case Study:
Aligning Customer Metrics Creates Opportunity

This market-leading technology company realized they needed to make customer perceptions relevant to their engineers, and aligned customer metrics to the metrics they track to create an impact their whole company benefited from.

The customer program becomes more relevant when people at all levels in the workplace understand its purpose and how it is aligned with their individual objectives. When this occurs, customer feedback results become an important part of the management information system and leaders are keenly tuned into how the customers’ view of the brand is aligned with their own key strategies. Instead of customer issues and complaints being a burden, they become an opportunity for business units and departments to work together toward common goals.

Challenge

One company realized that talking about customer perceptions with their engineers wasn’t going to get their attention. Instead, they knew they had to make the customer perceptions relevant and aligned to the lingo, metrics, and processes that are familiar to engineers.

How

With this goal in mind, they created a simple framework that maps the customer perception metrics to the metrics used to track the customer experience and the internal levers they control.

Outcome

Once the map was created they used various analytical techniques to identify the metrics and internal levers that had the strongest relationship with customer perceptions. They found that software defects per million hours (SWDPMH) was the most important metric, and were then able to focus the engineering audience on improving this metric.