Cross-channel attribution. For customer insights and marketing practitioners, attribution is a white hot measurement topic. It’s viewed as the best way to measure effectiveness of marketing and media campaigns; a way for firms to assess…truly assess… the value of the customer journey.  For the past 18 months, I have been living and breathing this topic and today I am happy….no, I’m elated…to announce the official publication of the Cross-Channel Attribution Playbook.

What’s a playbook, you ask?  Well, a playbook is a framework to help organizations develop expertise around a specific business topic.  The Cross-Channel Attribution Playbook helps marketers and customer insights professionals to take strategic steps in building an attribution strategy within their organization.  It includes 12 chapters, including an executive overview, which covers different aspects of developing and managing a cross-channel attribution measurement framework.  The four “chapters” specifically help organizations:

In a previous blog post, SysAid – a provider of IT management solutions – was kind enough to share some metrics/performance snapshots collected from its customers. As a quick recap, SysAid captures service desk benchmarking information through its customers’ use of its software (on an opt-in basis of course) for the benefit of all.

At some point we should sit down and compare the SysAid stats to those provided by HDI – a great independent source of service desk benchmarks – that’s a challenge to you Roy Atkinson … BTW, I hope the HDI 2013 event is going well in Las Vegas this week (the Twitter hash tag is #hdiconf13 for people, like me, who aren’t there). Anyway, back to those SysAid stats …

A selection of community-based service desk stats …

There are two points to note here: not all SysAid customers participate (according to its website, SysAid now has over 100,000 customer organizations); and I have cherry-picked a handful of the available stats from March 2013. There is also one caveat from me – there is no differentiation of organization size in these stats, we need to drill down further to account for any small or very large organization bias.

Percentage of incident tickets originating from the End User Portal, Average 60.31%

Are you trying to take your current customer experience measurement to the next level?

Many of the customer experience professionals we talk to regularly are working on improving their customer experience measurement. You are probably one of them. You might be working on picking the right metrics, on connecting customer experience to business outcomes or to operational variables, on using data to improve the customer experience, or on getting traction for CX measurement in your organization. To conquer any or all of these challenges, you need a solid and well-founded customer experience measurement framework. 

In Forrester's workshop Customer Experience Measurement Essentials, you will:

• Learn the fundamentals of measuring customer experience in both a business-to-consumer and business-to-business world.
• Get to know Forrester's framework for how to identify, organize, present, and get buy-in for customer experience metrics across the enterprise.
• Discuss your approach and challenges with your CX peers and see what other companies are doing.

It is that dreaded time of year again where we have to report via the performance management system (PMS) on our individual performance and the value we bring to the organization. I say dreaded, because we all know that in reality the goals and objectives were set some time ago in the past, maybe a year ago, and a lot has happened since that time. The person you report to may have changed, you were redirected to other tasks, and so on. Everything seemed possible at the time of the objective setting, but now the reality hits that you were or may have been far too optimistic about your own capability. The self-assessment is difficult as you are not sure whether your manager has the same view as you. You believe you met the objective, but does their expectation meet your actual delivery? If a good performance relates to more money, the pressure and stress builds.

So whilst I was preparing for my Orlando Business Architecture Forum presentation I started to think about how business architecture teams measure and manage their performance. One of my next reports for Forrester’s business architecture playbook addresses BA performance. It was also a hot topic for the EA Council members in Orlando. I had a number of 1-on-1’s with clients who particularly asked about BA metrics and performance — in particular, “What do other business architecture teams do?”

I started listing the questions that, when answered by clients, would lead to a very valuable report for all BA leaders:

Do you measure your BA’s performance? Clients often advise me that they have fairly mature BA practices. However, very few can articulate how they measure their performance, and often comment that the business asks them to demonstrate how BA adds value. So, it would be useful to understand whether BA leaders measure their team’s performance and why they do or don’t.