Skip to main content

Drive Toward Truly Useful KPIs [Video]

Appian Contributor
March 29, 2013

Every business or organization has specific key performance indicators - or KPIs - that it uses to measure its progress. However, while maintaining a set of measurable standards is important, organizations should also proactively evaluate those indicators to ensure they are measuring what really matters.

The idea of keeping the same KPIs constantly can be well-intentioned, but that level of inertia may only serve to prevent companies from moving forward.

For example, a customer service team may be measured on the number of client messages and problems it responds to and how quickly they are resolved.

While that data remains important, it may be even more important to see how many of those clients call back for assistance with the same issue in the future. If the same client is forced to make multiple calls to resolve an issue, then a fast resolution time is less useful.

Other accurate and useful performance measures to consider might be how frequently a team is able to resolve client issues during a single interaction, and how specific issues correlate with lower client satisfaction scores. Those numbers can significantly impact customer churn and retention.

While this level of evaluation may be difficult to achieve with siloed legacy applications, an integrated business process management system can work to pull information from across the organization to create a more complete picture of the client relationship, increase accountability, and drive improvement throughout the business.