I write a lot about understanding why you’re doing something as a means of helping you to decide what to do and how to do it.  It’s an idea I’ve stolen from Simon Sinek who wrote a whole book about it in fact.  His book was general and strategic but I also apply it to the tactical and transactional world of measures because that’s where the concept often hits the ground and plays into your practice.  In fact, I’ve written a lot about Goodhart’s Law, that when a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a good measure.  I’d like to share an example of that and why it’s so important to understand the basis behind why you’re looking to measure something in the first place.

A good friend of mine and fellow CX leader told me recently the story about an organization he was working with.  It was a big group with a wide variety of Customer types and personas.  As such he was often discussing how different approaches to the gathering of VoC data were important and necessary.  So far so good.  But when he approached one of the groups he was presented with a curious request:  Could they change their survey to using ‘smiley-faces’ instead of numbers?  […]