Start Aligning Your Metrics With Long-Term Value

“Aligning metrics with long-term value” was named as one of the 5 imperatives for leaders in a recent article by Justin Robbins.

Yet too often, contact centres focus on short-term wins – with metrics like Average Handling Time dominating daily reporting.

So, what does it take to close the gap between short-term targets and long-term value? We asked the CX experts to find out.

Define What Long-Term Value Really Means

The first step in aligning metrics to long-term value is to define what this value actually means, cutting your reliance on legacy metrics and taking a long hard look at not just what your contact centre is trying to achieve, but what the organization is trying to achieve as well.

“Too often, the things that we measure inside our organizations and our contact centres are based on old habits and old ways of thinking and doing.

Quite simply, we haven’t always stopped to realign what we define as success in the day-to-day of the contact centre with what the organization is trying to achieve long term.” – Justin Robbins, Founder & Principal Analyst at Metric Sherpa

By taking the time to define what long-term value looks like, you can “reset understanding” and stop doing things the way they’ve always been done. Replacing this instead with clarity and intentionality.

Move Away From Purely Reactive Metrics

Once long-term value is clearly defined, the next challenge is ensuring that metrics are predictive rather than purely reactive.

After all, when metrics are reactive to the environment, they’re not actually helping you move towards long-term value, they’re only helping address short-term problems.

This distinction is critical! Reactive metrics manage symptoms, while proactive metrics drive systemic improvements.

The challenge is to create a balanced scorecard that includes both efficiency and meaningful customer outcomes, ensuring that every metric contributes to a bigger organizational objective.

For advice on handling outliers and anomalies in your metrics – so you can respond in a positive and proactive way, read our article: Get Ahead of KPI Fluctuations in Your Contact Centre

Connect Perception to Actual Outcomes

Reconsider how you’re using perception-based metrics too! By understanding what drives customer perceptions – such as low wait times or fast social media responses – you can begin to design experiences that generate real long-term value.

This chain-of-thought approach encourages teams to think beyond the raw metrics and consider the causal factors that shape customer behaviour.

“We always need to be mindful that metrics capture a perception, but ideally we want to use that perception as a way to predict what’s going to happen in the future.

Is that customer going to refer us? Is that customer going to churn? Are they going to have more customer lifetime value?

Therefore the challenge lies in connecting perception to actual outcomes. When you make that link with your choice of metrics, you can start to drive conversations about the circumstances that created that perception and make changes that drive real long-term value.” – Michel Stevens, Customer Experience Master (CXM)

It’s also important to understand the end-to-end customer journey to give additional context to how the customer felt and what’s happened as a result of their experience.

It’s about trying to understand what happened and when, what the customer experienced in that moment, and then what ultimately came out of that situation as a result.

By linking experiences to behaviours, contact centres can shift from being reactive service centres to strategic engines for long-term growth.

Balance Organizational Value With Customer Value

You also need to reconcile the organization’s view of value with the customer’s view of value, as this typically creates a lot of tension! After all, an organization looks at monetary things.

They look at how they can make something tangible for them – into money – whereas customers are more focused on the product or service they’ve just purchased and solving a resulting problem in their personal life.

Balancing these perspectives requires a structural approach that integrates both business and customer priorities.

Few teams manage to do this well! But it’s key to try and put two hats on at the same time and ask: is this valuable for the organization AND valuable for the customer?

Another key balancing act to try and get right is to look at how well you’re capturing the functional AND emotional aspects of customer experience.

As it’s equally important to understand “How happy am I with a product?” as “How well do I feel taken care of?” – as combining functional and emotional insights gives you a more strategic view of where to invest in both processes and relationships moving forward.

For the key steps to follow for a thorough review of your current KPIs, read our article: How to Complete an Audit on Your Current KPIs

Stop Trying to Track Every Possible Metric Without Prioritization

And above all, stop trying to track every possible metric without prioritization! It sets everyone up to fail!

Therefore, as you begin to refine your mix of metrics and align them with long-term value, it’s critical to also look at categorizing your interactions – as not all customer engagements carry the same weight.  

One way to overcome this is to split metrics into two categories: efficiency and strategic value.

“I really view value in these two categories: how are we making it easy for the customer to be successful, easy to do business with us, efficient and respectful of their time, and then how are we co-creating, giving them a sense of identity, and generating that partnership value?

This approach prevents teams from being overwhelmed by data and helps focus attention on what drives real outcomes. It’s a practical framework that balances short-term efficiency with long-term strategic value.” – Nate Brown, Head of CX Advisory for Metric Sherpa and Co-Founder of CX Accelerator

By focusing on meaningful outcomes in the areas where it matters most, you can ensure your metrics are aligned with the behaviours that create true long-term value.

Ultimately, this builds a culture and operation that doesn’t just focus on the day-to-day job of completing transactions but looks at the wider impact of this behaviour on the strategic direction of the business as a whole.

Are Your Metrics Aligned to Long-Term Value?

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With thanks to the following people for sharing their thoughts for this article:

• Justin Robbins, Founder & Principal Analyst at Metric Sherpa
• Michel Stevens, Customer Experience Master (CXM)
• Nate Brown, Head of CX Advisory for Metric Sherpa and Co-Founder of CX Accelerator

If you want more information on contact centre metrics, read these articles next:

• The Top 10 Onboarding Metrics – Are You Using Them?
• Top 10 Customer Experience KPIs
• Are Your Team Leaders Too Busy Chasing Metrics?

Author: Megan Jones
Reviewed by: Xander Freeman