Page 219 - Performance Leadership

208 • Part III Principles from the Values and Social Dimensions

excellent experience that counts. This is really important for British
Telecom. In BT’s traditional business, landlines, statistics suggest that
there is, on average, a customer contact opportunity every seven years.
It had better be good; there are not many chances to correct that first
impression.
Customer satisfaction is an important driver, but there may be a
difference between what people say and what people do. Share of
wallet might be an alternative performance indicator. This metric
looks a bit like market share, but on a micro level. Instead of track-
ing the total market, it looks at what a person spends on telecom-
munications, and which portion of that amount goes to British
Telecom. It would be impossible to track that on the personal level,
so there will have to be aggregates for customer segments. Another
performance indicator tracking the consequences of an excellent
experience is the adoption rate of new products. If BT routinely
delivers an excellent experience, customers could expect this in new
business as well. This metric also serves a different purpose: focus-
ing on expanding the business, because landlines are not a growing
business.
All of these three metrics are lagging indicators; they describe a
result. A leading indicator would have to be used as well. For BT this
would be the service levels, particularly for more established products,
where customers have a relatively transactional relationship with the
company. In such relationships the customer experience is strongly
determined by meeting service levels, such as the time to solve out-of-
service problems, installing new landlines, accuracy of invoices, and
so forth. These service levels should preferably even be externally com-
municated, so that customers have a certain level of expectation. If
these service levels are routinely met, preferably with a significant profit
margin, this should drive high customer satisfaction and meet the
requirements of the mission statement.
Key performance indicators for BT could include:

• Customer satisfaction
• Share of wallet
• Adoption rate new products
• Service levels