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KRISS doesn’t stand for anything relating to risk that I am aware of. I just made it up to get you to read this blog on how to develop Key Risk Indicators. Sorry. KISS stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

When I work with organisations to help them develop KRIs I use the KISS principle. Because it is way different to the alternative. The alternative is a long list of KRIs that take up staff time to develop monitoring and reporting processes. All with questionable value, especially if your organisation’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are crap as I wrote about two weeks ago in Reading the tea leaves.

Last week in Heading them off at the pass, I wrote that your KRIs come from your KPIs and to get the KPIs sorted first. That is the beginning of the KISS principle. Don’t create a whole new separate world. Make sure it is all linked to the uncertainty of achieving objectives.

Next, apply the 7+/-2 principle which is that we humble humans can only focus on five to nine things at a time. If I was to give you 27 KPIs for the year, you would have no chance of remembering them. However, if I gave you 5 KPIs containing those 27 you could remember the 5 and for the one you’re most concerned about, you could name the 5 or so items that make it up.
Applying that to KRIs, you can have a KRI for customer service based on a number of sub-KRIs like ‘wait times’ or ‘% of complaints resolved within a period of time.’

One way of working out which sub-KRIs you should be caring about the most is to prepare a customer service risk profile. This will lead you to identify the key drivers of uncertainty (risks) and the controls being relied on. For example, having KPIs for wait times for call centre staff.

If customer service is something you are focusing on (and by the way all risk teams should be focused on their own customer service), I highly recommend Service Mindset by Jaquie Scammell. It even has an endorsement from David Thodey, ex CEO of Telstra, who I wrote about last week in Heading them off at the pass.

To read more on KRIs you can download Chapter 9; Reading the Signals from my book Risky Business: How Successful Organisations Embrace Uncertainty. Better still, buy my book and gain access to free resources that are there to help organisations perform better, faster!

Stay safe!

PS. I’m thrilled to say my book Risky Business hit the #1 Amazon Best Seller list recently in the Risk Management Category. If you have read it and think it’s worthy of a review, I would greatly appreciate your time in leaving one. You would make this risk nerd very, very happy. You can email it through to me HERE.