CDCI believes that you get what you measure and research is a powerful tool for helping organizations improve the quality of their strategic decisions about customers, people, business processes, products and services, and pricing. Unfortunately, our experience shows that most companies measure many of the wrong things with the wrong objectives in mind. Not everything that gets counted matters and not everything that matters can be counted. Most big organizations have an extensive customer satisfaction measurement program and extensive operational measures. However, some of the typical problems with these systems are that they are not:

• Linked to one another
• Focused on the same objectives
• Driven by customer data
• Connected to strategic business goals
• Hardwired to customer touch points or moments of truth
• Integrated with communication, process enhancement and training activities

As important as what you measure is what you do with the information. Even when measurement is done well, companies often fail to deploy the lessons learned from research into the organization. The information stays within a small group of people, which limits the ability of the organization to take action at the customer interface.

CDCI believes that the primary purpose of customer and employee research is to make focused changes to improve organizational performance. This requires providing managers and other personnel with compelling information that is timely, reliable, easy to understand, and actionable. It also requires that organizations have communication, process enhancement and training resources available to rapidly mobilize the organization to respond to the opportunities found in the research.

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