Is there an elephant in the room? Part 1

There are numerous metrics that measure the different relationships between a customer and the company.  Customer satisfaction,  customer experience, customer effort,  customer rage, customer loyalty, there may be others.

I am reminded of an elephant in the room described by several people each with a limited perspective. Each is asked to describe the animal in the middle of the room. One person grabs the tail and gives a comprehensive description. Another touches the leg and provides a comprehensive description of the leg. Another touches the trunk and like the others gives a comprehensive description of the elephant’s trunk. I could go on with more descriptions of the elephant by others with similar limited vision, but I think you get the idea, 

While it is true that each description of one aspect of the elephant is accurate there is no consistency between the metrics to define the entire elephant in the room. This analogy has some relevance to the metrics that are being used today to understand the relationship between the customer and the company. There are many people who have carefully constructed metrics that are statistically accurate and allow hypotheses to be extracted and yield valid data to describe an aspect of a customer/company relationship.

There appears to be a lot of dissent between those who have rigorously developed a specific metric to describe the elephant with others who also developed a metric different from all the others. In fact, virtually all of the metrics have been rigorously developed to describe the elephant. However, the sum of all the metrics don’t seem to accurately describe the elephant.  What is missing is a comprehensive metric that would support the many individual metrics from the tail, leg, trunk, and other specific measures of the elephant.  However, at this time there appears to be no single metric that integrates the various specific metrics currently used.

Part 2 will take the next step.