How To Hit KPIs Without Compromising The Customer Experience

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a well-known buzzword within the B2B industry. KPIs are essentially the key targets a brand should track to support successful business outcomes. KPIs essentially put a target or a focus on achievable goals - primarily, it's employees and managers that are tasked with KPIs that help the company, in general, meet business goals. That might be setting a target for the required customer acquisition or the number of daily sales.

It's already easy to tell that KPIs are very much number driven. Sometimes that has a detrimental impact on the customer experience - read on to find out why and how to avoid it.

A Closer Look At KPIs

KPIs are essential in both the B2C and B2B industries, but the B2B industry seems to gravitate more towards creating KPIs that align with business goals. But there is still an inherent gap between wanting to focus on a business goal or strategy and measuring the success of that focus. For example, brand awareness is the number one focus for 89% of B2B brands, yet only 48% of those metrics are branding-related. In fact, one study that interviewed hundreds of small to medium businesses found that 49% of them failed to identify KPIs.

The brands that do, however, are automatically ahead of the race. KPIs bring focus, awareness to changes and create a drive to meet business goals. Some brands will naturally create KPIs without realising. For example, one business strategy might be to make 50 sales per day. A business would then monitor that, and then a KPI is born. More invasive KPIs typically come from bigger organisations. For example, they might set teams of employees on the task of making 50 sales a day rather than the company.

KPIs aren't related solely to sales. They can track projects, operations, and the success of internal processes.

KPIs That Positively Impact Customer Experience And Engagement

Naturally, when KPIs are heavily aimed toward sales and business success, it's easy to neglect the customer experience and engagement. That is until brands make customer engagement and awareness a KPI. Customer incentive programmes, for example, are a great way to track customer engagement, loyalty, and brand awareness.

Other KPIs can also positively impact the customer experience, like measuring and reducing the average lead response time, new leads by source, and sales productivity - according to HubSpot, these are key KPIs for B2B brands.

One metric that can benefit brands and customers is the marketing qualified leads (MQL) to sales qualified leads (SQL). Marketing basically starts the buying cycle by guiding prospective sales leads towards a brand. During this stage, prospective buyers will download content, redeem offers, and sign up for newsletters. Following the success of a marketing strategy, the next step should be SQL, which is a lead deemed ready to speak to a sales rep and progress through the sales cycle.

What's the benefit of both? Measuring the two metrics lets brands know how successful marketing campaigns are. Therefore, potentially redirecting them towards a new direction that's more appealing for the consumer.

Where Brands Go Wrong With KPIs

The number one wrongdoing of KPIs is focusing on KPIs. That doesn't make sense? Well, focusing solely on KPIs can create a KPI tunnel vision. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, KPIs intend to help businesses have successful brand outcomes, but that can sometimes neglect the consumer. KPIs should contain a healthy mix of indicators that focus on the engagement of the consumer and the total number of sales.

Similarly, KPIs shouldn't focus solely on sales - they should focus on internal processes, employee productivity and happiness, and anything that pushes the organisation forwards rather than drives sales up.

KPIs are essential. Any business not focusing on them lacks direction and guidance towards successful business outcomes. It's a no-brainer to measure success; otherwise, brands will be none the wiser about success or failure. Ensuring one of the KPIs is customer engagement and happiness will ensure that the sales side of KPIs doesn't overrule customer happiness.