Management Consulting: What KPIs do you measure and realistic goals have you established for customer service?

At we usually relied on to measure client satisfaction. There is more literature on NPS elsewhere, but it would be typical to send surveys to key client stakeholders/counterparts toward the end of a case or immediately afterward. NPS being a Bain-developed metric, the partners seemed to take it pretty seriously.

Short answer is - it depends on what you mean by 'customer'. If a firm has fairly expensive / bespoke products or services and has small customer base of customers, the KPIs you are looking at would take on an account management flavor. In this case, you are looking at interaction KPIs such as frequency, recency and effectiveness of customer contact by the account manager, as well as account KPIs such as revenue diversity across sector / product, and the size of each account. An example of this is a manufacturing firm where the top 200 customers makes up half the sales volume. Salespeople (usually well-networked industry executives) track their contacts in a CRM, identify customers who know multiple members of the sales force and 'swarm' them by pitching value propositions. If a firm is working with standardised products / SKUs and selling in a B2C environment, the KPIs would be to manage the experience of your ultimate consumer. That would be customer interaction process KPIs such as time to resolution and first time resolution, warranty process KPIs such as warranties triggered by product and replacement lead times, and customer service perception KPIs such as the Net Promoter Score. What goals to pursue are a high level question which is hard to answer meaningfully without some context. But the approach I generally use is to mix business manager knowledge with reasonable data analysis, such as presenting seasonality effects in the forum where decisions for KPI targets are made.