4 Easy Tips for Building Better Business Metrics

One of Power Digital’s main drivers for success in business is being data driven. Great data ultimately give us great business metrics, which in turn provide insight to help us find weak points, areas that need attention and improvement to have the ability to take action. It doesn’t matter what a company is measuring or what metrics you are looking at, metrics help let you know what is working/what is not and can easily be used to keep your team motivated and the company on track.

The problem in today’s business setting is everyone is constantly looking at bad data, or they are looking at the same data that every other company is looking at. The key to making great business decisions is finding the pertinent data that affects your business, not every other business!

Think about what your specific situation really needs. Your answer as to why you’re tracking something should be because you review it and utilize it to make a difference (Don’t track data just for the sake of tracking). Paying too much attention to details you don’t use can lead to missed opportunities and wasted dollars.  

Market Comparisons

As you build better business metrics for your business, you’ll want to look at market comparisons. What are your competitors tracking? What are industry metrics that you see? Hopefully you have realized by now that data matters. Selecting the best metrics for your business can be a daunting task.

Tip #1: You do not want too many data points that cloud the important ones. You want to use all your metrics for the success of your business, employees and customers.

Related: 5 Tools to Keep Your Marketing Team Organized This Year

Tip #2: You’ll also want to change which business metrics you are viewing at different stages in your business. Don’t be afraid to revise what you are tracking and don’t get stuck in a box with what you need to review. For instance if you are tracking your sales funnel vs. client retention. This can help you know when to focus on acquiring new customers and when to focus on retention of your current customers. Most new businesses focus solely on new business while more mature businesses track retention (It’s much cheaper to keep a customer then acquire a new one).

At Power Digital we put together reports providing analysis, statistics and details for the different departments, ultimately giving them visibility into the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) that pertain to them most. As you set up or use a market comparison, be sure you are selecting and utilizing the criteria that is important to YOUR business.

Relationship Research

Having a healthy working environment is vital. If the employees are happy then your customers are going to have a great experience. The opposite is true as well. If your employees are negative and lacking enthusiasm, this is going to cause your customer to have a less than perfect experience. If you think about it, have you walked into a place and felt the enthusiasm? Have you returned? Have you walked into a place where you felt, seen or were the recipient of someone else’s bad day or bad attitude? Did you return?

Related: Tips for Managing Relationships in the Workplace

Relationship research is something that a lot of companies do not monitor and track. Tracking your employees to help them grow and succeed is VITAL especially in a service industry where your people are your product, like Power Digital.

Tip #3: One employee metric you can track is overall employee happiness. We use a software called 15Five where employees rate their week from 1-5, while answering three critical questions providing vital feedback to their managers and hire ups.

Investing in your employees will help your customers have great experiences and will help with employee and customer retention.

Tapping Into The “Unnecessary” Data

As I mentioned earlier, there is the primary data that you read everyday and then there’s the data that isn’t really necessary. You take a glance, you look it over but really don’t do anything about it. However, is there a story to be told in the “unnecessary” data?

There’s a bunch of averages and then there could be one customer experience that stands out. That one time when a customer had an experience that wasn’t normal that should be investigated to see if it could have been prevented or can be prevented in the future.

Related: Why You Should Give Your Employees Unlimited PTO

Tip #4: Not all data can be tracked or quantified by a number or chart. Be sure to not be robotic and dig deeper then what the numbers or reports show. Don’t be afraid to question the WHY?

Are you tracking the happiness of your employees? Are you tracking stress levels? What KPI’s do you use on a daily, weekly, monthly to help grow your organization?

Data and business metrics matter!  They can help you on the road to success.