Risk appetites should always be aimed at improving business performance. Say your organization has a strategic imperative of customer satisfaction and your risk appetite statement outlines a low tolerance for customer dissatisfaction. You could set risk management goals for a particular customer satisfaction survey; however, this metric doesn’t offer any actionable solution to improve customer service. With a survey you’ll always be acting on customer impressions from last month as an effect of last year’s policies.
Instead, your risk management metrics need to be looking to the future. Back to our customer service department, case volume, for example, is available as cases are created and will allow you to detect emerging trends long before they have significantly affected your organization. In this example, other forward-looking metrics could include call-wait time or email response time. Unlike the results of a survey, these metrics are actionable if they are found to be outside of their defined tolerance.