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Posts Tagged ‘Performance’

How to Choose Performance Management Software

Performance management software is a software application that you use to keep track of how your organization is doing. This type of software replaces relying on printed or static reports or even trying to manage a home-made performance management system using spreadsheets. The software automatically takes in new actuals and results from your enterprise databases and compares them to budgets, targets, goals and/or forecasts. So charts, diagrams and graphs are created automatically and and are free from human error, guaranteeing maximum accuracy. Also, since the process is completely automated, your daily, weekly, or monthly analysis of your enterprise performance becomes much more streamlined and the time savings leads to greater productivity.

Performance management solutions are mainly aimed at medium to large companies that have to keep track of the performance of various lines of business and departmental functions. This might include, but is not limited to inventory tracking, sales performance, geographical tracking of actuals and a lot of other key metrics that keep the business performing well. The main aim is to provide a easy way for business managers and executives to keep track of how the business is faring at any given time. So there are various aspects to be looked into while you go about selecting performance management software.

The first thing to do is not to get confused by the lingo. You will read terms like Corporate Performance Management (CMP), Business Performance Management (BPM) or Strategic Performance Management (SPM). In actuality, they are one and the same, and at the most they are only slightly varied. All of them aim to give you the necessary tools to track your organization. So when you are looking for a performance management solution, look for the capabilities that you would want the software to have. These can include everything that you have been doing manually so far and a lot of it depends on the kind of organization that you run.

For organizations selling products, you are measuring how much of each SKU is stored in inventory and how in-stock and turnover rates of specific SKU’s are performing in comparison to each other. Any organization also needs to keep track of sales performance on many different levels, daily, weekly, monthly, or annually. For multi-national corporations, every aspect of business comes in to play, including manufacturing efficiency, market mechanics, individual performance tracking and other things. The application that you purchase should allow you to track any type of data, such as these, rather than being dedicated only to one functional area. This also means the application needs to access unlimited disparate data sources in one interface. The application should be flexible enough to allow comparisons of any historical and current data, to slice and dice by various drivers, and include visualization features to permit the discovery of patterns or trends in the data.

Flexibility for date selection and date grouping are other features that should be supported in the software that you are evaluating. This means that the software should have to ability to easily expand and contract the timeline of any displayed data that is date based. For example, take daily and monthly sales numbers. By looking at a larger time frame you will be easily able to locate patterns, such as seasonal ones, if any exist. There should also geo-tagging features, whereby large companies with a national and/or global presence can keep track of their performances by area.

In the current global business scene, it is important to be highly competitive. Companies’ ability to beat and rise up from competition is considered important because revenues depend on it. Of course, it is apparent that competitive firms are more able to generate good income and profits because consumers and customers are reliant and trusting on them.

Competitiveness and good relationship with customers can be ensured by setting and putting in place good customer service practices. Good customer service levels would help your business achieve the competitiveness it needs. That is because putting into consideration the major perceptions of customers would make your company strive harder to develop good products and improve already existing products and services. To do so, you must adhere to good and working customer service metrics.

If your business has a customer service operations, you must ensure a recommended customer service metrics is in place. Usually, working customer service metrics include the following as main factors.

– Volume of customer inquiries handled per hour. This is a measure of productivity. Of course, the higher the number of customers attended to in an hour, the better. But there is one common and logical setback. If you would force your customer service representatives to take numerous and continuous calls, for sure, the quality of call service would suffer.

– Volume of customer complaints. This is not actually a direct customer service metrics but more of a performance indicator of the business and production operations. The more complaints your company receive, the more it is evident that your company has failed to be efficient in rendering and producing quality goods and services.

– Volume of resolved customer complaints. If you would run a daily tally about the volume of resolved complaints from customers, you would be able to distinguish the effectiveness of the customer service unit. In return, customer satisfaction would be boosted. Customer service metrics should always include this measure.

– Return customers volume. If customers keep on returning or buying your products, that means they are satisfied with the quality of services and products. In the customer service level, if clients keep on coming back despite their complaints, that means they realize that your business is still satisfactory.

Such customer service metrics can be considered more inclined on the quantitative side. Of course, by looking and tallying volumes of satisfied and dissatisfied customers, there are numbers involved. Quantitative metrics like the one described above are easier to handle and interpret.

However, you can also adopt and integrate within your quantitative metrics a good and working qualitative customer service metrics. A qualitative customer service metrics would take note and reflect stated opinions and overall perceptions held by customers. Most of the time, it is much more interesting to look at qualitative customer service metrics because they point more to quality issues. Interpretation would be easier and more convenient. If you would be able to look at qualitative measures and at the same time at quantitative customer service metrics, the better. Customer service metrics are a great way to evaluate the performance of helpdesk or call-center unit of any company.