Having trouble measuring certain job roles?

Accountability via Measureables

Creating measurable targets for employees makes it easy for you and them to know how they’re doing.  At Oakline Solutions, we believe every employee has a number.  The challenge here, is that some job roles are easier to measure.

Certain job roles couldn’t be any more straight forward.  Let’s take one of the harder roles, but one is the easiest to measure.  Sales!  Every business needs that Sales department to create more sales for the company.  This is tied to multiple other areas within the business.  Let’s look at some of the general measureables that most sales departments should have.

• Conversion Rate Win/Lose
• Average deal size
• Overall Revenue generated
• Number of Activities/Touches Per Close
• Percentage of Quota

These are easy right?  It’s all about generating revenue, through activity.  All those through simple math, show you the performance of the sales rep, or the sales team as a whole.

Hard Targets

Now let’s talk about a position that’s a little more ambiguous.  Customer Service!  Do you have difficulty trying to define exactly how to measure performance that’s fair to both you and the employee?

When looking at customer services personnel, a few things might jump to mind:

• Number of calls, emails, transactions with customers
• Number of complaints from customers

Problem here is, the volume of activities a customer service rep/department has to field, is more reflective of your service/product delivery isn’t it?  If the product is faulty, people call customer service.  If they need assistance with your service, they call customer service or support.  So all inbound calls would technically be the performance of everyone else right?  How can we gauge actual performance.  There’s always an answer, but here’s a few ideas that can be applied:

• Outbound calls to recent sales or completed projects to gauge satisfaction.
• Ideas brought to the table to improve service delivery from complaints received.
• Methods to perform more real-time, interactive displays of customer service instead of waiting for customer to call when things are bad

If this is something that comes up continually for you, and you don’t have a good way to track performance of those elusive departments, let us know.  There’s a lot solutions to these depending on your industry that will give every employee a number, a target to be held accountable to.