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7 Metrics to Help you Measure Success and ROI in Business

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures (OPM) Article |Business Metrics|7 Metrics to Help you Measure Success and ROI in BusinessA Business metric is a useful way to understand and analyse the tracking of a business process. A business analyst should focus on metrics to measure Return on Investment (ROI) to make the business operation’s success.

You will get to know whether your company is getting the intended results or getting back to the drawing board. Measuring business success is quite challenging for many. You have to evaluate your business, define your goals, set key performance indicators (KPIs) for the objectives set, and then measure and track these KPIs. Let us cover some useful metrics that you can employ when measuring success.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is an essential tool in measuring your business success and marketing campaigns. It is possible to get feedback from your customers directly by adding consumer surveys to your site. This helps you in knowing your customer’s needs meaning you can tell your customers’ satisfaction rate.

You can learn what they don’t like about different facets of your business. For example, you can tell the reasons they visit your site, and if it leads to conversions. This significantly helps you in strategizing more effective marketing campaigns. Also, paying more attention to them will go a long way since your visitors are your target audience.

Customer follow-up can also be done by sending them things like an email asking the customer to rate your services. This is important as it helps in keeping your customers more satisfied.

Website Traffic

This is simply the number of visitors landing on your web pages. More users translate to more traffic to your site. Remember, your website serves as the face of your brand and your home base. The primary traffic sources are search, direct campaign, and referral. Your site may have traffic from campaigns such as banner ads as well.

To increase traffic to your website, optimize all pages on your site with relevant keywords, and boost your website security. Besides all, security plays a vital role in drawing traffic to the site, and for that, you should buy a cheap SSL certificate to help secure your web users. This will encourage more transactions because users are becoming wary of online web security. More users will only transact on safe business sites.

Cash Flow Levels

This is the measure of the difference between cash inflow and outflow. Cash inflow levels are dependent mainly on the nature of your business. For instance, you will need more cash in hand if you run a convenience store. Cash flow accounts for all the money that comes in the form of investment and goods returned, and sales revenue.

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Employee Satisfaction

Your employee’s satisfaction is as important as your customers’ satisfaction. Yes, your employee’s morale is correlated directly to business success. A much satisfied and motivated employee could turn into a more productive and effective employee. Keeping your employee’s satisfaction levels high leads to a long commitment to the company and the team.

It is essential to check whether your employees feel rewarded and are satisfied with their work. To determine your employee satisfaction, conduct team surveys to collect feedback on the teamwork and HR to collect personal satisfaction levels. You can improve your employee satisfaction by introducing some perks such as free office coffee, creating an atmosphere for work and growth, etc.

Net Profit Margin

The main aim of any business is to earn a profit. This metric shows how your pricing and total sales volume impact your business in terms of the costs contracted: the lower your profit margin, the lower or higher your cost. Your profit margin calculations should include variable expenses paid regularly, such as utilities, insurance, taxes, and salaries.

It would help if you diminished the cost in case of losing profit ratio. If you happen to make more profit than you were previously, this means that your customer base is expanding, and your sales have increased. Understanding your revenue will give you crucial insights into your business.

Customer Retention

The essence of customer retention is to keep as many customers as possible. Having loyal customers is beneficial as it helps to grow your sales and create awareness more about your services.

The retention rate shows the number of clients who make repeat purchases and use your product over an extended period. Retaining customers is achievable by having things like special rewards or customer loyalty programs for old customers.

Number of Sales

Sales indicate whether people are interested in buying your product or service. They also tell us whether your marketing efforts are paying up. However, the number of sales can be affected by other factors like recent market changes.

Sales metrics can be measured in the number of purchases made directly from the site. To increase your sales, one can hire new talent, expand your marketing goals, or introduce irresistible discount offers.

Wrap Up

This guide has provided you with a few metrics that can help in kick-starting your growth journey. You can pick some of the essential metrics based on your needs for better and effective operations.

Measurement of Success in Business

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Measurement of Success|Measurement of Success in BusinessSuccess is a relative term and does not only mean different things for different people but also different things for different businesses. What makes success even more tricky to measure or define is that it also changes over time or circumstance. What could be a success today might be underperformance the next.

As an entrepreneur, the one thing that you want to see is growth, but that growth does not necessarily mean that the bank account is filling up nicely. So how does one go about measuring success in business?

Looking at the business’s financials

Obviously, business financials are a good indication of whether the business is successful or not. No business can survive without money and no business can grow with it either. But when looking at the money, one must focus on all three the major streams or trails of money, the income statement, the balance sheet and the cash flow statement.
The income statement shows you how much money the business made over a period. It indicates the profits and losses of the business and gives an indication of the measure of profitability during the specified time.

Most entrepreneurs who are new to the game will place a very high value on the income statement and can tend to forget about the balance sheet.

The balance sheet is one of the most important financial indicators seeing that it depicts the health of the venture. It measures how much you owe and how much you own. A successful entrepreneur will home in on the debt of the business and strategically align it with the income statement to pay off the debt as soon as possible while still making a profit.

The cash flow of the business shows the state of how liquid the cash in the business is. When there is a cash flow problem, it can cause some serious strain on the other two financial aspects and ultimately lower the success of the business.

As the management writer for write my essay service puts it, “being successful does not necessarily mean that the business is debt, free, but rather that the debt repayments can be made without constraining the cash flow.”

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures eBook

Customer satisfaction signs

When a customer has a bad experience, they probably will not buy from your business or use your services again. As an entrepreneur, you will know how important customer satisfaction is. Not only does it indicate that the business is doing well, but it is also a reflection of your efforts.

There is a certain pride involved with customer satisfaction, especially if you have poured everything into your business. To get a bad review or to deliver bad service, is like a slap in the face and an attack on your character.

It sometimes happens that bad experiences go unnoticed and this is only because it was not picked up and dealt with. There are many tools available that will help the young entrepreneur to measure how satisfied the clients are.

Surveys and questionnaires are excellent tools that provide an in-depth quality check of your products or services. The review does not necessarily have to be bad to make improvements.

Reviews are very specific and when a bad review is received, it should be dealt with immediately. A bad review could be turned into something positive if the customer feels as though their concerns were heard.

These reviews could also be posted on the company website so that people can see that real people gave their opinions. When you see mostly good reviews and positive surveys, it is a good indication that the company is successful.

The new clients that come in

A successful business will show gradual growth over time. When a business is turning a profit, it generally means that it is good health and successful. However, when the profits stay stagnant, it means that the business is not growing. New customers are a much more reliable indicator of the success of a business.

When you know how many new customers you get, you can measure the success and projected growth of the company. On the other hand, when the same old customers keep you afloat, then it might be time to invest in a marketing strategy. Customers come and go, but if there is not a general influx of customers, they will only end up going.
To see if new customers are supporting you, draw up a client list with email addresses to see if your sales are limited to existing clients.

The statistics writer and researcher at the essay writing service says that once you have a client list and a system in place, you can measure how well your marketing strategies are doing. Every time you launch a new product or run a promotion, you can run averages on your customers and establish which strategy is the best for bringing in new clients.

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Measurement of Success|Measurement of Success in BusinessIt is not just about the clients

A business can only sustain growth if the people who are doing the work are doing it well. As a young entrepreneur, you might not have too many people working for you, but as your business grows, so also will your list of employees.

One way to measure the success of the business is to see how well the staff are doing. When they are discontent, it could spill over into the quality of their work and threaten the customer experience.

Running performance reviews is an excellent way of finding out where the bad spots are. Many entrepreneurs fail to do performance reviews because they do not want to step on the toes of the employees. The thing is, if they are not made aware of the areas where they lack, they will never know how they can improve.

It also serves as a morale booster when there are performance bonuses on the line. Nothing puts a smile on the faces of employees like money in the bank.

Stay on top of market trends

A successful business is one that keeps with the times. Technology has changed everything in the world, and it continues to change every industry. When your business is successful, it does not mean that you can relax and keep on with the same recipe, expecting the same results.

Unfortunately, you need to keep up with the times and the best way to do this is to see what the competition is doing. If your business is aimed at service delivery and you do not apply the newest techniques, then you will start to see a decline in profits.

Look to yourself

There is a bit of subjectivity involved in measuring the success of a business, which is why you should measure what your business is doing against your own expectations. It does not matter how well it is doing on paper.
If it does not meet your expectations, the business could still be unsuccessful. You need to be content with the growth of the business and if you are not, then a new plan can be drawn up.

Conclusion

The success of any business depends on so many factors that it is hard to put it all into one category. The main thing to remember is to continuously evaluate the state of your business and track where things are going well and where there is a need. The more you tinker with the things you do not like, the more successful the business will become.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Tiffany HarperTiffany Harper is a freelance writer from New York. She loves to share her experience through blog posts. She began writing from the professional writer service for Write my essay and later for buy college papers. Please do not hesitate to contact her on twitter.

How To Improve Customer Satisfaction

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management ArticleOne area of your business you should pay special attention to and make more of an effort is your customers. After all, they’re the ones handing over their money to help keep your business afloat so never underestimate their importance.

Your company will begin to thrive once you can ultimately improve your overall customer satisfaction scores. When clients are happy, then the entire business will experience less mayhem, and your employees start to like their jobs better. However, you first need to accept that you can always be advancing in this area and then put measures in place that are going to help you pick up your performance.

Ask for Feedback

Improve customer satisfaction by proactively asking for and seeking out feedback from your clients. Send out surveys, pick up the phone or meet one on one and confront them about what it is they do and don’t like about how your business operates. Dive deeper into the specifics so you know exactly what it is you can change that will truly make a difference and draw in more customers. It’s common for companies to make assumptions about what it is clients are looking for and then head in the wrong direction. It’s a wise idea to have the data to back up your claims and only commit to certain modifications if you know your customers are onboard.

Be Available & Responsive

In this day and age, it’s important always to be available to your customers and ready to help. Not only do you want to be available to answer questions and inquiries during your regular business hours, but it’s also a wise idea to provide support across multiple channels. What will help you out the most is to make sure you’re staffed appropriately by using an online employee shift planning software. You can read more here about how you can get this going in your workplace, so you’re always properly staffed and no customer is left wanting.

Train Your Employees

Your company culture should include making customer satisfaction a top priority if you’re going to succeed in this area. It’s worth you taking the time to train your employees and make sure everyone understands how to interact with clients properly. Pay special attention to your customer service department and confirm that your staff knows best practices and how to handle all sorts of difficult requests and inquiries. Create policies and procedures that both your employees and customers are to follow to make your jobs easier.

Listen on Social Media

One place where you can actually learn a lot about your customers and get a better idea of how they feel about you is on social media. Assign staff members who are in charge of this responsibility and can spend a good amount of time listening and jumping into conversations where appropriate. Use this as a way to collect a lot of valuable data and then have these individuals report back to everyone in the company about what they’re discovering. There may be aspects you’re unaware of that are hurting your business and causing customers to feel dissatisfied. If you need more clarification about a specific topic or complaint, then reach out to that individual privately and collect more information on the matter.

Build Relationships

Communicate to your team that you want them to work on building relationships with customers and not simply thinking of each person as a number or transaction. Get to know your clients on an individual level and show that you care about them as people. Encourage staff members to create an open dialogue with customers and find out more about why they do or don’t enjoy doing business with you. Be able to recognize and reward your most loyal customers and be sure to treat everyone with respect no matter how much money they’re spending with you. It doesn’t look good for your business when you don’t remember people by name who are consistently making a lot of purchases from you and are loyal advocates of your brand.

Exceed Expectations

You can improve customer satisfaction by not only delivering on your promise but also going above and beyond on a regular basis. Work to not only meet expectations but to exceed them time and time again. Instead of aiming for mediocre, shoot for the stars and show your customers that you truly want to see them satisfied after having made a purchase with your company. Not only take care of any problems that come your way but offer up a freebie or discount code they can use the next time they shop with you. Throw in an element of surprise once in a while and watch how quickly their faces light up and they’re willing to share their positive experiences with others.

Track Your Progress

You’re not going to know how well of a job you’re doing or how satisfied your customers are unless you track your progress. Set goals, keep score and monitor how you’re performing as a team throughout the year. Hold meetings that revolve around this topic specifically and get input from your employees about how you could be doing a better job. The only way to improve is to set goals and define metrics and then be diligent about observing how you’re performing and making changes where necessary. You should eventually notice an upward trend. Otherwise, you may have to adjust your approach and regroup about how you want to proceed.

Conclusion

Customers aren’t automatically going to be impressed with your business just because you have a solid product or service in place. They’ll want to be wowed and impressed in their interactions with you and see that you’re putting forth an extra effort each time they reach out or spend money. The good news is that you can use these tips to help you improve your customer satisfaction scores and make sure your business is offering your clients an unforgettable experience. It’s important you never stop learning and growing in this area if you want to guarantee a bright and steady future.