Measure What Matters to Customers

Learn why the most important activities that actually matter in your business are those that impact your customers.

One hundred years ago, the traditional accounting measures of costs, activities, efforts, and inputs met the needs of that era's businesses. But today, these internal metrics are narrow in their focus and have become less meaningful in the knowledge economy, with little effect, in the long run, on an organization's bottom line. Compelling and bold, Measure What Matters to Customers lays out an exciting, new road map for measuring customer value and successfully raising profits.

With proven methods, Ron Baker—renowned forward-thinker in the professional services firm field—shows you how to capitalize on Key Predictive Indicators (KPIs), innovative measures that define the success of your enterprise as your customers do. These are specific, identifiable details that customers value in the products and services they receive—details such as a preference to be contacted by phone instead of by e-mail, or a desire for rapid turnaround time on returned calls. Easy-to-read and relevant to your organization's bottom line, this groundbreaking book shows you how to use KPIs to, for example, effectively track marketing data to determine which customers respond well to things such as cross-selling or to find out how receptive other customers are to entirely new offerings from the firm. It also shows you how to employ KPIs to enable your firm to react appropriately to your customer's needs and increase the value they perceive, leading to higher profits. Topics covered include:

• Why the traditional metrics are no longer relevant to measuring the effectiveness of knowledge workers
• The new tectonic shift taking place in the economy—the transition from manual and service workers to knowledge workers and why that difference is critical to the future of your business
• How what you measure affects the value you provide to your customers
• How to increase the effectiveness of knowledge workers
• Developing KPIs for your company
• Increasing knowledge worker effectiveness

Seismic in the strategies it presents, Measure What Matters to Customers reveals how to regain a competitive advantage in the marketplace and allow your company to develop the measures that matter to your customers. Applicable to manufacturing and service businesses of all sizes, this important book will challenge managers' and executives' theories about which measures are important in their businesses. If you want to increase your company's profits by working smarter, this is the book for you.

1. The Canary in the Coal Mine
2. The Economy of Mind
3. The Old Business Equation
4. The New Business Equation
5. Pantometrists: Counting for the Sake of Counting
6. The Gospel of Efficiency
7. All Learning Starts with Theory
8. Constructing a Theory
9. Pantometry versus Theory
10. Measures that Matters
11. Developing KPIs for Your Company
12. Increasing Knowledge Worker Effectiveness
13. Managing by Results versus Managing by Means
14. Human Capital, Not Cattle
15. The Moral Hazards of Measurements
16. The Dreamers versus the Pantometrists

It is not badly written, but it doesn't contain very much useful stuff. The author is a recovering CPA, so we're not supposed to expect too much, and that is exactly what this book delivers, not very much.

He complains of the lack of theories of other authors but is frightening devoid of citing any theories that supports his small essays. But they are at last a bit entertaining, even if you wont gleam anything substantial from it. You may say that the title and the table of contents promises more than the book delivers, but at least it is coherent and the authors seems to be semi-sane (don't forget about the CPA-suff, as that explains the tone in the book and the marked disdain of the MBA educated people that he repeatedly expresses).

In short, it is readable, but there is very little to take home from this book.