A few years ago I met with a marketer who was trying to bring his company out of a slump. He didn't understand why customers weren't responding to promotions. When I asked what analysis he had available, he responded, "We know everything there is to know about our business. I'm 5'10". If you stack our daily reports on top of each other, they are taller than me. We have everything we need in analysis; we just need customers that buy."
Finding the numbers that make a difference in your business can be overwhelming in the information age. We have so much data at our fingertips that it is easy to get caught in the trap of analysis paralysis. There is a limit to the amount of data that you can absorb and apply.
Capturing data without applying it to grow your business, improve your service, and increase your profits is a waste of resources.
The marketer with almost six feet of daily reports was lost in the process of data acquisition. His team spent their time searching for new data instead of applying the information they had available. If you are experiencing data overload, here are some key metrics that help define the health of your business:
- Total number of customers successfully served
- Total number of customers with unresolved issues
- Ratio customer served to customers with unresolved issues.
- Employee satisfaction level
- Daily deposits (including comparison with previous time periods and projections)
- Daily withdrawals (hopefully significantly less than daily deposits)
- Customer service issues resolved (include comparison with unresolved issues)
- New customers
- Lost customers (hopefully less than new customers)
- Platinum customers
- Hit & Run Customers
- Email subscribers that actually open and click links
- Mobile subscribers that respond to text messages
- All cost metrics including acquisition, retention, and fulfillment
- Social media fans and followers that respond to promotions
- Employee turnover
There is always more data that can be included, but using these numbers will help you improve your acquisition, retention, morale, and profits. It's a good place to start (and better than playing the lottery.)