Customer focussed KPIs

Pieter Koenis - September 01, 2019

Have you ever tried to conduct the “5 times why” research method on yourself? I like to do it every now & then to unveil underlying motives I’m not aware of. For me it's a way to check-in with myself to see if these motives are the motives I really want to apply. Often they're not. Often they are a result of unconscious routine processes that doesn't give me the best result in the end.

I did this once with the business KPIs we had in place at Highside (a messaging API platform, now acquired by Messagebird). I asked myself 5 times why we had these KPIs. It struck me that the motives always where internally focused. Things like making more profit, growing business and getting more recognition. It made me feel selfish and it annoyed me that our customers were not represented in the motives for our KPIs.

Applying the "5 times why" research method in user interviewing

Does your customer benefit from a higher conversion rate?

I questioned myself, how do our customers benefit from a higher conversion rate? Of course it is an important number and you need to track it to monitor the results of your CRO projects. But I missed KPIs that told me how our customers were doing. Numbers that showed me how we could improve our customers’ experience.

To get some customer focussed KPIs in place, I started to list the three most important “jobs-to-be-done” of our customer when they used our platform. These were:

setting up API flows
debugging
adding credits to their account

If I could help my customers with getting these jobs done faster and easier we increased the positive experience of our customers, and therefore have happier customers.

How do you measure customer focussed KPIs?

I started with a simple benchmark number: how long do these tasks take to complete on average. From watching some Hotjar recordings and timing these tasks during user interviews I learned what the numbers were and where the bottlenecks are. The next weeks we worked on downsizing these numbers and after a month I measured again.

On average we won 10% of time for our customer already. We succeed to improve these first customer-focused-KPIs drastically already within 1 month. We helped our customer with getting their job done faster.

For me this is the perfect example of what customer focused KPIs can do and why you should have them in place. If you want your team to be truly customer centric, make sure you let them focus on the right thing: the customer.