I’m sure many of you are also doing this, but I just completed my goal review for 2012. Now, I’m gearing up to make 2013 even more fun, successful, and disciplined!
One of DE’s biggest success secrets from 2012 was the introduction of a dashboard. It serves as a scoreboard for the entire team to see “how we’re doing” as a company. Based on this dashboard, we created a daily cadence for our team and clarified, measurable expectations.
So, what exactly is a Dashboard?
It’s a custom computer program that pulls data from different sources then calculates and displays our performance metrics. Basically, it’s an instantly updated “goal progress window” that we display on big monitors in our office for all to see.
Why is it so important to have up to the minute numbers?
Can you imagine how hard it would be to watch a football game if there was no scoreboard? You would have to really pay attention to know what was going on. How much time is left on the clock? How many timeouts are left? Or even what the score is! Can your team pay attention to 4 or 5 goals that are critical to your company throughout the day— while they are doing their normal duties? Doubt it. I sure can’t.
Here are our critical service numbers that are put up for everyone to see on an up to the minute basis:
- Survey Responses: Up to the minute customer service score for the day. Number of total happy responses and percentage of negative.
- New Tickets: The number of tickets that have yet to be touched.
- Ticket Time: The amount of time since we last updated the customer on a particular issue.
You may be wondering why we don’t look at sales, revenue, profit, or expenses on an up to the minute basis. These are all trailing metrics for our business. If we do a great job, sales goes up. Why? Because people like you talk about us with your friends and before we know it, we have a new customer. Looking at revenue is like trying to drive your car while looking in the rear view mirror. It is based on work that was done weeks ago. These numbers do matter. We do look at these numbers on a weekly basis, just not daily.
The next issue we ran into was collecting real time data. How do we make that happen? The answer— Smart Phones. iPhone and Android development costs have come so far down that for a couple thousand dollars, you can put together a custom system to collect data from your team in the field or even walking around the office. While making their jobs easier, they can keep track of work while they are doing it rather than try to remember to write it down and enter it later.
Don’t have the cash to put together a digital dashboard?
Consider a big post it note in your lobby area or conference room. Meet every day for 10 minutes with your team to gather the numbers and put them up. Why? Because they need to know the score. This will also help them see what really matters to you.
Want to learn how you can get the score posted for your team to see all the time? Contact me at 734-975-0460 x 107 and I will help you out!
~Bruce
