Creating a baseline

Imagine that you've been getting user complaints about your CRM.

Maybe they're getting error messages. Maybe they're confused about what their membership gets them. Maybe they're frustrated by the difficulty of updating their own contact information.

Now imagine that you decide to improve the situation. It’s time to take some action.

But you know that a good goal is not just “getting better." It's a number on a metric that you can aim for.

In this case, you could aim to “reduce user complaints by 15%.”

So the next question is: Reduce them compared to what?

To know if you're improving, you'll need to start with a baseline, a number that indicates your current performance on this metric.

If you've been tracking user complaints in a systematic way, then you probably have what you need to figure out your current baseline. A little time spent in analyzing that data, and you’ve got it.

But if you can't figure out your current baseline, then you can't make a goal about reducing user complaints.

Instead you need a goal like: Create a system to measure the frequency of user complaints.

Here’s the thing:

A goal has a measurable outcome. If your current number of ways to measure is zero, then an important goal is moving it from zero to one.

All the best,
A.