I was reading an article about how measuring Average Handle Time (AHT) in a Financial Services company, did not allow a very eager Financial Services Agent to provide the best service she could have provided a customer.
The customer wanted to do something on the Financial Services company online website, but the Average Handle Time (AHT) metric did not allow her to spend more time on the phone with the customer, and give him more information that would have made his online interaction with the company’s website easier. Seems like that would brought the AHT metric for the whole center, as well as that particular agent down. So she had to bite her tongue and not tell the customer about something that would have prevented frustration on his part in the first phone call even though she knew about it! When he tried doing what he wanted to do, he could not and has to call them again on the phone!
The center explained that they were trying to increase the Customer Satisfaction KPI and if the AHT value goes up, the Customer Satisfaction KPI might suffer because that meant someone else was waiting to be serviced. However the above customer who had to call back again, would definitely would have brought that measurement down anyway!
So they may not have achieved anything more than frustrating an important customer!
Measurement and Reporting of KPIs should also identify these kinds of outliers, or exceptional cases, and allow them to be included in the analysis of the KPI performance. Metrics drive behavior and your interpretation of metrics should not enable the driving of undesirable behavior, eventually!
Many time, once we put technologies and metrics together, we think we have put behavior on auto-pilot! We may have automated the driving of undesired outcomes, rather than the desired ones instead! They are our tools and not ends in themselves. The ends, we will have to be very clear about and communicate them well!
Exceptions and outliers happen all the time and as long as we interpret metrics and measurements along with them, we should be fine!
The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions – Oliver Wendell Holmes
