Open Customer
Metrics Framework
V1, Spring 2016

Credits
Framework Collaborators
Mark Arnold
Senior Director, Strategy & Operations
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Rick Joslin
Executive Director of Certification & Training
HDIDavid Babb
Manager of Reporting & Analytics
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Adam Krob
CIO and Co-founder
KleverJohn Custy
Principal
JPC Group

Karen Lim
Vice President, Global Client Advocacy
Pitney Bowes

Cinda Daly
Content Strategist
KleverPaul Lyons
Senior Director, Global Support Services
Red HatHiren Dalal
Vice President, Business Unit Operations
CA Technologies

Judith Platz
VP Research, Customer Success & Support
Technology Services Industry Association

Paul Esch
Strategy & Development
TSANET

John Ragsdale
VP, Technology and Social ResearchTechnology Services Industry Association

Al Hahn
Executive Director
Association of Support Professionals

Mary Schmidt
Director of Research
Association of Support Professionals

Philip Verghis
CEO and Co-founder
KleverContact
Finula Darwin+1.781.591.0124
finula@getklever.com

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Contents
Executive Summary................................................................................................................................... 2
What the Open Customer Metrics Framework is meant to be ................................................................ 3
What it is not meant to be: ....................................................................................................................... 3
The Five Categories for the Open Customer Metrics Framework ............................................................ 4
Customer Category ................................................................................................................................... 6
Employee Category ................................................................................................................................... 8
Business Category ................................................................................................................................... 10
Knowledge/Collaboration Category........................................................................................................ 11
Acceleration Category ............................................................................................................................. 13
What we hope you will do next .............................................................................................................. 15

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The Open Customer Metrics Framework: Guiding not Grading
Executive Summary
Measurements are a way of communicating what is important to the organization. A good measurement
system is simple enough to focus attention on a few key elements that are important to the organizationand fair enough so that people at every level believe they can affect the measures. Your measurement
framework should facilitate an environment of learning and dialogue – not of control and compliance.
When you listen to your customers, employees and the business, and apply what you learn, you provide
lasting value to all. Unfortunately, leaders of customer support organizations do not have a standard
framework for reporting on what they measure. If anything, they measure too much and much of what
they measure isn’t actionable. So, what should they measure and why? More significantly, what should
they do with what they learn from the measures they have?
A team at Klever was working on this problem for a while and realized that together
we could be better than any one of us. We opened up our research and invited abroad group of organizations and leaders to spark a collaborative dialogue on how
we can work together on an Open Customer Metrics Framework.
This version is the first pass of our collaborative work. We have done deep research on a number ofdifferent metrics, frameworks for measurements, balanced scorecard approaches and added to this ourown decades of expertise running support organizations. Following this framework won’t be easy – butthere will be significant and transformative benefits.
There are five categories of measures, and within that, suggested measures for executives andsuggested measures for managers. The idea is to make sure we have a balance between listening to ourCustomers, Employees and the Business, and applying what we learn. There has to be a clear line ofsight between the objectives of the organization and what each person can affect.
We will make this and subsequent versions available for anyone to use, modify and build on with aCreative Commons license as long as you respect the copyright and always point back to the source(www.OCMFgroup.org) for the latest version.

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What the Open Customer Metrics Framework is meant to be
Open

Balanced
Tangible
Practical

Flexible… a collaborative effort that is not proprietary and does not endorse any
one vendor or consultant’s methodology. Anyone is free to use,
reproduce and even modify this as long as you respect the terms of the
copyright.
… creates a balanced scorecard approach for measuring what’s
important for modern services organizations.
… a way to address some of the most important drivers of value, not justthose that are easy to measure.
… not bogged down with theory and precision in areas where more
precision doesn’t make sense. Getting started with ‘good enough’ and‘directionally correct’ meaningful measures.
… take this framework and apply it in a way that makes sense. These area set of guidelines that you can modify for your particular situation.

What it is not meant to be:
Prescriptive
DefinitiveComprehensive

StaticEndorsement… there is no one right way.
… these are working definitions, not an expert’s definition.
… the measures are relatively broad, not focused as much on individual
performance as much as on factors that are important to theorganization.
… as more people share their experiences, we expect this framework tokeep getting better.
… of any particular company, organization or methodology. Nor do we
imply that they endorse us.

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The Five Categories for the Open Customer Metrics Framework
Category

Definition

Customer

How well are we meeting the needs ofcustomers?
Employee
How well are we meeting the needs of
employees?
Business
How well are we meeting the needs ofthe business?
Knowledge/ How well are we capturing and reCollaboration using what we already know in our
ecosystem?
Acceleration What is the rate of progress against
projects that will transform ourbusiness?

Focus
Rationale%20
The reason we exist
20
30
20

10

Knowledge workers needmeaningful work
Expanding the focus beyond justcost
60 – 90% of what we do has been
done before
In a highly interrupt-driven
environment, how do we ensure we
make progress on the ‘important’
not just the ‘urgent’?

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Working Definition:
Focus percentage is the default suggestion for percentage of focus/effort/time we expect an executive
would spend on a particular category of measures.
Tips:
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Focus percentages are meant to be guidelines that you can and should adapt for your particularsituation.
Explain the context and intent of the measures so people can understand what you are trying toaccomplish.
The two most difficult transitions for most executives will beo Moving from measurements as a means of ‘control and compliance’ to one of ‘listening
and learning’.
o Letting go of measures you have historically relied on and starting to capture and use
harder-to-measure categories like Knowledge/Collaboration) and Acceleration.
Some organizations have found that during the transition period it was useful to keep track of
the old way of measuring for a while – in parallel, but in the background until it became clearthat they weren’t adding enough additional value.
An activity-based measure is easy to measure and easy to manipulate. An example of an activitybased measure is commenting on, or creating two knowledge base articles a week. It’s also easy
to manipulate, since an agent can simply put in ‘I agree’ to the comments for an existing
document.
o Don’t put goals on activities.
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



This contrasts with an ‘outcome-based’ activity, which is much harder to measure and harder
to directly manipulate by a single individual. A good example is the Customer Effort Score*.
o It’s OK to put a goal on an outcome as long as you can provide your team with specificactionable behaviors you want them to demonstrate that will help them achieve thatoutcome.
More tips (& updated more frequently) available at: www.OCMFgroup.org.

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5Customer Category
The ‘Customer’ category has three components:
1) A relationship component.
2) A transactional component.
3) An emerging measure which involves listening to the service-related suggestions your customers
are making and acting on what they ask for.
High Level Category: Customer
How well are we meeting the needs of our customers?
Weight—20%
Rationale: The reason we exist
Measures for Executives

Measures for Managers

Options for relationship component include: Net Promoter Score* Secure Customer Index*
Options for transactional component include: Customer Satisfaction score (allteams)
 Customer Effort Score 2.0*

Emerging Measure % of Serviceability Suggestions madeby Customers Accepted

Options for transactional component include: Customer Satisfaction score (your team) First Contact Resolutionor First Day Closure
Emerging Measure Trend of Serviceability Suggestions madeby Customers

Working DefinitionsEmerging measures may not initially yield highly valid or reliable data, but they are important tobegin using. As measures become more valid and reliable, they become metrics.
Serviceability Suggestions are service-related suggestions from customers or employees. An
example may be where a customer who has been offered an upgrade by Sales and attempts to
use the new features, and contacts Support. However, Support has no idea of this offer, which
results in many extra steps before they can make use of the new features. The employee’s
suggestion? “Notify us when Sales makes an offer to an existing customer so we can make surethe customer is able to make full use of the additional functionality immediately.”% of Serviceability Suggestions from Customers Accepted
Service-related suggestions from your customers that are accepted (implemented) as apercentage of those that were submitted.
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Rationale:
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Tips:
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Customer Support has the broadest set of interactions with customers of any group in theorganization, yet we see only 50-60% of the total demand for our services -- and only a tiny
percentage of them makes a suggestion. So when someone does make a suggestion, we shouldcarefully listen to them and do something with what they say.
A simple rule of thumb is that for every time a customer encounters a problem, there is a 20%
hit to loyalty. In other words, for every five customers who have problems, one will leave thenext time they have a purchase opportunity1.

Net Promoter Score** and the Secure Customer Index* are based on periodic surveys and are ameasure of the ongoing relationship.
The Customer Effort Score* and Customer Satisfaction score are often based on a survey which
is sent to a customer after they interact with your Support team.
First Contact Resolution and First Day Closure are highly correlated with Customer Satisfaction,and it is more likely to be something your managers can impact, so that is why it is included in
the manager side.
If you don’t systematically collect and act on service-related suggestions from your customers,
start doing so now.
More tips (& updated more frequently) available at: www.OCMFgroup.org.

1

John A. Goodman, Customer Experience 3.0
Customer Effort Score, Net Promoter Score, Secure Customer Index, Q12 and KCSSM are the trademarks of CEB,
Sat Metrix, Burke, Gallup and the Consortium for Service Innovation respectively.
*

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Employee Category
The ‘Employee’ category has three components:
1) A relationship component.
2) A transactional component.
3) An emerging measure that is not normally tracked today which involves listening to youremployees and acting on what they ask for.
High Level Category: Employee
How well are we taking care of our employees
Weight—20%
Rationale: Knowledge workers need meaningful work.
Measures for Executives

Measures for Managers

Options for relationship component include: Employee Engagement (all teams)

Options for relationship component include: Employee Engagement for team

Options for transactional component include: Employee Satisfaction (all teams)
 Employee Turnover (all teams)

Options for transactional component include: Employee Satisfaction for team
 Employee Turnover for team
 Time to Proficiency for team

Emerging Measure: % of Serviceability Suggestions madeby Employees Accepted

Emerging Measure: Trend of serviceability suggestions madeby employees forwarded

Working definitions:

Employee Engagement is a periodic survey that measures how emotionally connected an
employee is to the organization. There are a number of commercial options, or you can create
your own as many organizations have done.

Employee Satisfaction is a periodic survey that measures how happy an employee is with theircurrent job and conditions.

% of Serviceability Suggestions from Employees Accepted are the suggestions from youremployees that are accepted (implemented) as a percentage of those that were submitted.

Time to Proficiency is a measure of how quickly a new team member is ‘proficient’ in their job
or how quickly an existing team member learns a new skill.

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Rationale: Employee engagement is a leading indicator of financial performance2.
 If you focus on the needs of the business and the needs of the customer at the expense ofyour team, you will get a high turnover rate.
Tips:
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2
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Research shows that 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement is influenced bydirect managers3.
Leaders at industry-leading customer support organizations do not accept a high turnoverrate as a byproduct of the high stress job their teams do.
o If your organization has a 10 percent annual turnover rate, you will lose half of yourexperienced workers in five years, even if total headcount is the same.
o Turnover costs between 100% to 150% of an employee’s annual salary.
If you don’t systematically collect and act on service-related suggestions from youremployees, start doing so now. One of the most common frustrations of customer support
teams is that while they know more about the internal workings of your entire organization
than any other group, their opinions/ideas for improvements are rarely solicited or actedon.
More tips (& updated more frequently) available at: www.OCMFgroup.org.

http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/163130/employee-engagement-drives-growth.aspx
http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/182792/managers-account-variance-employee-engagement.aspx
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Business Category
High Level Category: Business
How well are we meeting the needs of the business?
Weight—30%
Rationale: Expand the focus beyond just cost
Measures for Executives

Measures for Managers

Options include: Profit Margin of Service Revenueor Service Revenue per Support Employee
 Support Revenue Growth % Variance against Budget Forecast
One ofo Support Cost as a % of Revenueo Support FTE as a % of Company
FTE
o Warranty Costs as a % of Sales

Options:
 Case Load per Support Employee by Product orService Revenue per Support Employee by Product orService

Advanced Emerging Measure:
Customer Time to Value

Advanced Emerging Measure:
Time to Smile

Working Definitions:

Klever’s Law: Customer Time to Value = Time to Value (before sale) + Time to Value (after sale) +Time to Smile (after interruption).

Time to Smile is the total elapsed time between when a customer has their ability to use theproduct/service interrupted to the time they got back to a happy state. Note: This is often called‘Time to Resolution’ or ‘Time to Restore’.

Rationale:
Leading support organizations have realized that we have fixated on cost and efficiency at the expenseof a superior customer (and employee) experience or the value delivered. This is one category where weshould pull back on some of what we currently measure and report on, to free up mindshare to think
about and act on some of the other categories of measures.
Tip:
Shift the emphasis away from internally focused numbers to those that are focused on end-to-end
processes, from the customer’s point of view, like Customer Time to Value and Time to Smile. This will
require leadership and discussions with other groups.
More tips (& updated more frequently) available at: www.OCMFgroup.org.

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10Knowledge/Collaboration Category
High Level Category: Knowledge/Collaboration
How well are we capturing and re-using what we already know in our ecosystem?
Weight—20%
Rationale: 60 – 90% of what we do has been done or solved before
Measures for Executives

Measures for Managers

Options:
 Level Zero Solvable Time to Publish Ratio of New to Known Incidents being
handled by the Support organization
Emerging Measures Collaboration Effort Score (all teams)
 % of knowledge-driven suggestions thatare accepted

Options: Attach Rate
 Level Zero Solvable Reuse Rate Participation Ratio Article Quality Index
Emerging Measures:
 Collaboration Effort Score (for team) Number of knowledge-driven suggestions
madeWorking Definitions:
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Level Zero Solvable
The percent of incidents resolved by the Support organization that could have been resolved by
the customer using self-service.
Time to Publish‘Publish most of what you know, quickly, to your customers and it will dramatically improvecustomer success with self-service.’
Ratio of new to known incidents being handled by the support organization.
o Ideal state, 85% new.
Attach Rate
How many incidents have at least one knowledge article attached to it.
Participation Ratio
Article Quality Index
Collaboration Effort Score
This is an emerging measure that is best handled by a survey question. Something like
“Department X makes it easy for me to collaborate with them.”
Knowledge-driven suggestions are suggestions for improvement that are made by analyzing thedata from your knowledge articles.
% of Knowledge-driven suggestions Accepted
Suggestions for improvement that came from analyzing your knowledge articles that are
accepted (implemented) as a percentage of those that were submitted.

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Rationale:
Knowledge-sharing is a set of behaviors, supported by best-in-class methodologies (like KCS*SM) andenabled by technologies. Fundamentally, people have to want to share knowledge and it has to become
part of their workflow.
Tips:

One of the struggles with knowledge-sharing is that most executives don’t understand how tomanage it and tie it into business objectives. Here is one approach that involves looking at four
key measures to get you started.
The first two addresses the fact that you should get most of the knowledge that yourorganization has into the hands of your customers as quickly as possible. The third looks to see
how easy it is to collaborate with other groups. The fourth looks at how well you are harvesting
actionable information from your knowledge articles.
1) Measure Level Zero Solvable –take the actual words your customers use when they contact
you and use these as search terms on your online website to see what percentage ofsolutions could have been solved by your customers if this information was available online.
2) The second measure is to look at Time to Publish. This is a measure of how fast it takes to gofrom known internally to available externally. (Think minutes, not weeks.)
3) The third part -- Collaboration Effort Score – will give you a sense of how easy or difficult it isfor teams to interact across groups.
4) % of knowledge-driven suggestions that are accepted closes the loop between actionable
information from knowledge articles and your doing something about it as an executive.



A big opportunity is to embed knowledge-sharing techniques outside just the support
organization. (This will help the Time to Smile and Time to Customer Value measures.)More tips (& updated more frequently) available at: www.OCMFgroup.org.

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Acceleration Category
High Level Category: Acceleration
What is the rate of progress, or rate of improvement, against projects that will transform our business?
Weight—10%
Rationale: Make sure we make progress on the ‘important’, not just the ‘urgent’?
Measures for Executives
Measures for Managers

Options:
 Measures Rationalization Project Think through how to engage with
employees and include their input into
decision making
 Knowledge Management
 Bringing down Time to Smile by 50%

Options:

Adoption/communication/training/measuring
the results or impacts of the projects% of Projects completed on time
% of Projects completed within budget

Working Definitions:

Measures rationalization project
Perhaps one of the first projects would be to take an inventory of what you currently aremeasuring (and why), what you do with it and then see how to make a transition to themeasures in the Open Customer Metrics Framework.

Rationale:
In the interrupt-driven world of customer support, we rarely have the luxury of uninterrupted time tomake big improvements. In order to do that, we have to slow down and think, try intelligent
experiments and adopt a learning loop that allows us to make significant improvement in outcomes.
Focusing on Acceleration (the rate at which improvements are realized) as a measure is a way to stay on
track.
This category is the hardest to pin down, but also perhaps the most important to make sure you arealways applying what you learn about your customers, your business and your employees.
Tips:
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Focus on the long term view -- which may be as long as a multi-year goal -- while delivering value
each quarter.
Make sure you get top management sponsorship and communicate early and often to ensure thatthey still support the project.
As you choose which Acceleration projects to start with, consider the capacity of yourteam/organization to do the work that is needed, and the capacity of the organization to adopt thechanges. Sometimes you will have to figure out what you can stop doing in order to free up
capacity.
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
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Give clear ‘guiderails’ where people should not go outside, but within those boundaries, theyshould be free to make radical improvements (and make mistakes).
A really good way to make an impact at a company level is to target improvements where support
plays a key role in. For example, end to end projects involving product quality or process quality
across multiple departments in a company.
Check to see if your company has a Quality team, Six Sigma team or a Project Management
Office. They often have talent and resources that can help your Acceleration project(s) significantly.
More tips (& updated more frequently) available at: www.OCMFgroup.org.

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What we hope you will do next
Practitioners:
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Download and use this paper as the basis for change in your organization. (Please respect the
copyright and licensing information and make sure you always point back to the latest version atwww.ocmfgroup.org.)
Participate at the conversation in the Measures, Metrics, Madness group on Linked In.
If you use this framework and find it useful, pay it forward – share with others on social media thatyou used it or adapted it with a link to the OCMFgroup.org web site. The more that do this, the more
likely it is to become a true standard – one that vendors adopt.
Let your vendors, systems integrators and partners know that they should help develop the Open
Customer Metrics Framework into their offerings.
If are a leader in an organization or association and want to join the group volunteering to make adifference, join us.

Vendors/Systems Integrators:Join the movement and make a difference in your customer’s lives and that of their customers.
Include the standard measures as part of your ‘out of the box’ reports.
If you use this framework and find it useful, pay it forward – share with others on social media thatyou used it with a link to the OCMFgroup.org web site.
Join the conversation and give us feedback – help us help you make it part of your offerings.

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15