Monitoring Business Performance: Strategies For Success

Monitoring a company's performance is essential to its long-term success. By tracking relevant business metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs), businesses can measure their progress toward specific goals and make informed decisions to improve their operations. This process involves understanding both financial and non-financial metrics, from revenue and profit margins to customer satisfaction and employee engagement. With the right tools and strategies, businesses can enhance their productivity, competitiveness, and overall performance.

Live monitoring and testing

Firstly, performance monitoring companies like Digivante offer a range of solutions to assess a business's performance. They can test websites for issues before their launch, run performance and optimisation tests to identify areas of underperformance, and provide live monitoring to track daily coverage and conversions. This can help businesses boost sales and enhance their online presence.

Additionally, direct feedback from customers is invaluable for gauging performance. Reviews and feedback can highlight areas of weakness and provide insights into what changes customers would like to see. Employing a fake follower checker can ensure these reviews are genuine, and creating a review page on the website, providing incentives, and requesting feedback from past clients can encourage more responses.

Analytics tools are another way to automate business performance tracking. These digital software applications can track specific aspects of a business, such as cash flow or finance, and gather data from various sources for analysis. Many of these tools can also predict future business success.

For server-based businesses, server monitoring is vital. By tracking metrics such as CPU usage, network bandwidth, memory consumption, and operating system performance, businesses can identify performance issues and prevent disruptions. Comprehensive server monitoring includes file/folder monitoring, event log monitoring, disk usage capacity, and network bandwidth and capacity tracking.

Furthermore, application performance monitoring (APM) is key for software-based businesses. APM tools provide automated ways to monitor configured metrics and alert teams when issues arise. By understanding how customers use their software, businesses can actively engage to meet their requirements and build the right products. Common APM tools include ManageEngine Applications Manager, Datadog APM, New Relic, and IBM's performance management tool.

In conclusion, live monitoring and testing are essential for companies to identify issues, improve performance, and meet customer expectations. By utilising performance monitoring services, customer feedback, analytics tools, server monitoring, and APM tools, businesses can gain valuable insights to enhance their operations and overall performance.

Customer feedback

Surveys are the most well-known method of collecting customer feedback. They can be long or short, and they can be sent via email or pop up on your website. For longer-form surveys, there are many options, including SurveyKing, which offers a free platform for small businesses. For short, one-question surveys, you can use a tool like Qualaroo.

When creating a survey, it is important to keep it short and to the point. Only include the questions you really need the answers to. Also, make sure to use a consistent rating scale and avoid leading or loaded questions.

Email and Customer Contact Forms

Email is one of the easiest ways to gather candid customer feedback. You can use each interaction as an opportunity to gather feedback by setting clear expectations, organizing email feedback, and sending personalized responses.

Exploratory Customer Interviews

Reaching out to customers directly can open up conversations that otherwise wouldn't happen. Qualitative stories from customers bring colour and nuance to quantitative feedback. They also help you understand the feelings behind customer decisions and the community's response to your brand or decisions. When conducting customer interviews, it is important to use open-ended questions and practice active listening.

Social Media

Social media can be a valuable source of customer feedback. Customers often share their feedback on social media platforms, even if the business hasn't asked for it. By monitoring social media, you can gain access to an untapped reservoir of candid feedback. Additionally, many social media networks include built-in polling tools that can be used to collect feedback.

Instant Feedback from Your Website

You can collect instant customer feedback from your website without asking any questions by using an embeddable on-site widget like Beacon. This tool pulls articles into a webpage that can be valuable to potential customers and collects data on the most popular articles.

Other Ways to Collect Customer Feedback

• Phone calls: This can be an easy and inexpensive way to collect anecdotal customer feedback, especially for smaller companies.
• Relationship surveys: These surveys evaluate the overall health of a customer relationship and can be administered via email, in-app, by phone, snail mail, or in-person.
• Face-to-face feedback: Face-to-face interactions provide a high degree of personal touch and enable you to observe body language and office environment.
• Transactional surveys: These surveys ask questions specific to one or a set of interactions and can be paired with other data points to provide context for why a customer may be happy or unhappy.
• Integrated monitoring programs: These programs can pull in multiple sources of customer data (phone, email, surveys, social media, etc.) and present relevant dashboards for each employee or function in real-time.
• Customer exit interviews: Conducted when customers make vendor changes or find a better alternative, these interviews can provide valuable feedback on why customers are leaving.
• Feedback boxes: These are one-question forms placed in a highly visible area on your website. They can bring insights you might not expect, such as bugs and other problems with the user experience.
• Heatmaps: Tools like Hotjar track which sections of your website people are visiting, where they are clicking, and where they tend to get stuck. This information can help you improve the user experience.
• Live chat sessions: You can get quick feedback on your customer service from visitors who have sought help from your live chat.
• Customer feedback forms: Provide a dedicated feedback email address or form on your website so customers can send their grievances and complaints.
• NPS (Net Promoter Score): NPS is a customer satisfaction benchmark that measures how likely your customers are to recommend your brand to a friend.
• Social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are popular social media channels for collecting customer feedback.
• Online communities: Create a forum or Facebook group to generate feedback and facilitate discussion between customers and your business.
• Feedback on other sites: Use tools like Trackur or Yext to track conversations about your brand across all platforms, including media coverage, blogs, local listings, and online forums.
• In-app feedback: An in-app message is ideal for getting feedback on your app's functionality and any problems customers encounter.
• Facebook reactions: Facebook's additional reactions (love, haha, wow, sad, angry) allow you to get fast feedback about your products or services.
• Order confirmation page: You can seek feedback about a customer's online shopping experience on the order confirmation page.
• Prizes or gifts: Offer incentives such as free shipping, discounts, or gift cards to customers in exchange for feedback.

Acting on Customer Feedback

Once you have collected customer feedback, it is important to analyze and act on it. Here are some ways to use customer feedback to improve your business:

• Improve the online user experience: Customer feedback can help you identify bugs or glitches that your testing team might have missed. Make it easy for customers to report problems and consider hiring a UX designer to optimize your website and mobile app.
• Build social influence: Create testimonial pages, respond to online reviews, and examine your social media platforms to build social proof and enhance your brand.
• Evolve your product line: Listen to customer feedback to identify new products or services that your customers want. For example, if many customers are asking for a specific type of product, consider adding it to your line.
• Improve customer service: Use customer feedback to educate your support team, refine your chatbot, and proactively seek post-sale feedback to address problems before they become bigger issues.
• Identify new markets: If you're considering expanding, ask your customers for their opinions to gauge demand for a new product or location.
• Make customers feel valued: Share changes that came from customer feedback to show that

Analytics tools

For example, Google Analytics is a powerful website analytics tool that helps businesses understand how people interact with their website. It tracks website traffic and user behavior, including user demographics and interests. This information can be used to fine-tune a business's strategy.

• Adobe Analytics: A subscription-based web analytics and customer intelligence tool that helps make informed decisions, improve operations, and drive business growth.
• Qlik Analytics: A user-friendly business intelligence tool that helps make sense of data through interactive visual dashboards.
• Microsoft Power BI: A user-friendly business intelligence platform with advanced data analytics and visualization capabilities.
• Domo: A cloud-based BI and analytics platform that extracts actionable insights from business data.
• Looker: A cloud-based data analytics and business intelligence platform that allows users to explore, analyze, and share insights from their data.

When choosing an analytics tool, it's important to consider the metrics you want to track, your business goals, and your technical level. Some tools, like Google Analytics, are user-friendly and suitable for those without advanced skills. Others, like Apache Spark, have a steep learning curve and require advanced technical skills.

Employee performance evaluation

Monitoring a company's performance is critical for success in today's competitive business landscape. This involves tracking relevant business metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs), that indicate the progress of the business goals.

A crucial aspect of monitoring a company's performance is the evaluation of employee performance. This not only helps to understand how employees are doing but also provides feedback on the overall functioning of the business.

Management by Objectives (MBO)

Managers and employees work together to identify, plan, organise, and communicate objectives for a specific appraisal period. Clear goals are set, and managers and employees periodically discuss progress to assess the feasibility of achieving those objectives. At the end of the review period, employees are evaluated based on their results, with successful employees receiving promotions and salary increases, while those who have not met objectives may receive further training.

360-Degree Feedback

This method collects anonymous feedback on an employee's performance from their circle of influence, including managers, peers, subordinates, and even clients or customers. It provides employees with comprehensive feedback and helps eliminate bias in performance reviews.

Assessment Centre Method

This method involves employees participating in social simulation exercises, informal discussions, fact-finding exercises, and decision-making problems. It offers a clear picture of how an employee is performing and how others perceive them, as well as predicting future job performance.

Behaviourally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS)

BARS compares employee performance with specific behavioural examples that are anchored to numerical ratings. Each performance level is described by multiple BARS statements, which serve as a yardstick to measure an individual's performance against predetermined standards.

Psychological Appraisals

Qualified psychologists conduct tests, interviews, and discussions to assess an employee's future performance and hidden potential. This method focuses on seven major components: interpersonal skills, cognitive abilities, intellectual traits, leadership skills, personality traits, emotional quotient, and other related skills.

Human-Resource (Cost) Accounting Method

This method analyses an employee's performance through the monetary benefits they bring to the company. It compares the cost of retaining an employee with the monetary contributions they generate for the organisation.

Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation

Quantitative evaluation uses statistics and standards to track productivity, cost, time, income, ROI, productivity, and market share. Qualitative evaluation focuses on visually observable aspects of performance, such as teamwork, communication skills, and absenteeism, and includes descriptive comments on an employee's daily habits, challenges, and successes.

Continuous Feedback

Rather than relying on annual performance reviews, continuous feedback involves ongoing, timely engagement between managers and employees. This allows for more immediate intervention when an employee is underperforming or doing exceptionally well.

Critical Incident Method

This method focuses on specific events where an employee's behaviour was positive or negative, providing insight on how to align with best practices. It can be used to evaluate how employees handle customer complaints and other incidents.

Profitability and Productivity Evaluation

Software systems can help evaluate the profitability of employees by calculating the total time spent on a project multiplied by the employee's hourly rate versus the allocated budget. This can identify projects that are making a loss, and productivity evaluations can reveal why projects are not meeting anticipated profit margins.

Customer Satisfaction Evaluation

Measuring and tracking customer service performance over time is critical to organisational success. Evaluating how the customer service team performs and where improvements are needed helps to ensure satisfied, repeat customers and drive sales.

Meetings and appraisals

Performance appraisals are a chance for line managers and employees to review an employee's performance and set objectives for the future. They are a crucial part of performance management, which includes regular one-on-ones and frequent reviews. These appraisals help the employee feel engaged with the company and their tasks.

Performance reviews can be stressful, but they don't have to be. They are an opportunity to give and receive constructive feedback, and they should be approached with an open and collaborative mindset.

Before the Meeting

Performance reviews should be well-prepared, with notes made in advance, and the employee given plenty of notice (at least two weeks is considered fair). Self-assessment forms can be a useful tool to get the employee thinking about their strengths, weaknesses, and future goals.

During the Meeting

The meeting should be structured with a clear agenda and goals. It should be collaborative, with open and honest dialogue, and the employee should be given the chance to lead the discussion where possible, sharing their reactions and ideas.

The focus should be on evidence of performance, rather than personal opinions, and the discussion should be positive, emphasising the employee's development and encouraging personal growth.

It's important to discuss accomplishments, strengths, and weaknesses, always framing them in the context of the "why" – how they impact the team and the organisation. Be specific, using concrete examples, and focus on behaviours rather than making assumptions about personality traits.

When discussing improvements, give the employee the chance to be self-aware and bring up their own ideas for growth. Provide constructive feedback with a focus on the why, and how increased performance ties into their impact on the team and company.

After the Meeting

It's important to document the discussion and share the notes with the employee. A follow-up plan should be established, with continuous check-ins to monitor progress and provide support.

Tips for Effective Performance Reviews

• Be prepared – obtain necessary data and materials in advance
• Be direct, factual, and detail-oriented
• Listen intentionally – allow the employee to share their thoughts and perceptions
• Focus on work performance based on specific, job-related criteria, not attitude, personality, or character
• Engage around solutions, not just pointing out problems

Frequently asked questions