The Customer Experience Edge: Technology and Techniques for Delivering an Enduring, Profitable and Positive Experience to Your Customers

CHAPTER 11Measures of Success

The top objective for nearly half of corporate social strategists in 2011 is to create ROI measurements for their social media strategies.

—ALTIMETER GROUP, 2010

MANAGEMENT GURU PETER DRUCKER had it right: if you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it. And with regard to the customer experience, he might have added, if you can’t manage the effort, it’s going to fail, sooner or later.

Of course, metrics is a topic that people seem to prefer reading about to implementing. And even when companies do use metrics, they often measure the wrong things. In most organizations, many employees are compensated based on metrics that actually work against improving the customer experience (average call-handling time, for ...