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How will you know that your culture of continuous service improvement, your culture of always uplifting your service, is actually getting stronger? What will you track? What will you measure? What needle will you seek to move that will let you know that your culture of continuous service improvement is indeed getting stronger? It is absolutely vital that you find a way to answer that question because otherwise, you could spend a lot of time and energy focusing people in the wrong direction. So, let’s take a look at this more closely. We’re going to work right now with commercial businesses. Government agencies have different final outcomes and objectives. But for businesses, for commercial organizations, the ultimate commercial objectives have to do with top-line revenue, bottom line profit, market share, market reputation, and number of repeat customers. Now, how will you know that you’re going to get these quantifiable, measurable, final, ultimate objectives? Well, you would get an indication that that’s coming from a natural leading indicator. That would be your survey and your index scores. If you’re getting higher and higher scores in customer satisfaction and customer delight, in Net Promoter Score and customer effort rating. If you’re naturally getting higher numbers in your surveys and indexes, then you’re going to get the ultimate commercial objectives. But very few organizations use these surveys on a regular basis- daily or weekly. So how are you going to keep your finger on the pulse? What would be the leading indicator that would let you know you’re going to get better scores? Well, that would be the number of positive compliments that you’re getting. The encouraging feedback, the thumbs up, the five-star reviews, the “Attaboy!”, and the positive social comments coming from clients, customers, and colleagues. If you’re getting a lot of compliments, you’re going to get higher scores. And if you’re getting consistently higher scores, you’re going to earn the money, that is your ultimate commercial objective. Now, there’s one more spot here on the bottom. What is the necessary precursor to generate the leading indicator called positive compliments that leads to index scores that leads to ultimate objectives? Will people give you a compliment if you serve them as they expected? No, that’s not why people compliment. People will compliment you if you’ve done something beyond their expectations. If you’ve done something different, something new, something unexpected. This means your people need to have those new insights and those new ideas and generate action ideas and then take action steps. Those are the new action steps that lead to the compliments. Those accumulated compliments reveal their power in the index scores and survey improvements. And when those go up, your ultimate objectives are achieved. Now, here’s the problem, and this is why I say “Measure What Really Matters.” is one of the rules of service leadership. Where do senior leaders tend to spend an enormous amount of time and energy and talk about a lot? Top line, bottom line, market share, reputation, ultimate commercial objectives. But where can your people actually do something every day? Where can every single person from the call center to the shop floor and every internal department write? It’s in the actual generation of the ideas. But here’s the question. Does your organization actually measure that? Do you keep track of “How many new ideas have we generated this month?” “How many new insights and new action steps have we come up with for our department to do with another department to improve our internal service?” “How many new ideas have we generated to take better care of our new customers or our loyal customers or our repeat customers or the customers we’ve lost that will bring them back?” If you’re not measuring new insights, ideas and action steps, well, then you’re not measuring what really matters.