“Tinder on Customers” is the monthly Cloud Wars Live podcast series featuring Bonnie Tinder. Bonnie is the founder and CEO of Raven Intelligence, an independent B2B peer review site that’s amplifying the voice of the customer. She focuses on software customers, consulting partners and software vendors, and helps identify the best partners for their needs. In this episode, we talk “vanity metrics” that most of us hear about all the time—and how to stay focused on the metrics that truly matter.
Episode 21: Vanity Metrics
The Big Themes:
- The trap of vanity metrics: certain statistics you hear all the time, like “we have 96% customer satisfaction,” are not telling the full story. These metrics are easy to come by and make us feel good, but in the end they do not really help us.
- Metrics that actually matter: in a digital transformation, the stats that you need are those that tie back to business objectives. This means revenue improvements, cost reductions, and working capital improvements.
- Trust but verify: Raven Intelligence can help with choosing a vendor or partner by helping you verify the metrics you’re hearing from salespeople. It’s important to confirm the source of the stat, and its relevance to your business and goals.
The Big Quote: “You hear a statistic like ‘on-time delivery.’ But how is that defined? Because if on-time delivery is 96%, and it’s based on a date that’s moved eight times… Well, it’s easy to have an on-time delivery for a moving target. And so in those types of cases, when you hear numbers like that, you always want to sort of peel back the onion.”
Stream the audio-only version of this episode:
More from Bonnie Tinder:
- Read Bonnie’s recent blog post on vanity metrics.
- Explore “voice of the customer” insights and send Bonnie a message via her Acceleration Economy Analyst page.
