Most organizations, especially in IT, are good at establishing metrics and key performance indicators to report on their performance. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t fully appreciate how detrimental it can be to select the wrong metrics.

How not to Measure Customer Service

At the beginning of my career, I worked in a call centre. In the early years, we measured everything under the sun. We had a balanced scorecard and we believed that was the be-all and end-all of our business. Unfortunately, we measured and communicated the wrong things. Because it was a call centre, we emphasized things like average handle time, number of calls, and after-call time. However, these measures drove the wrong behaviours. They incentivized our customer support personnel to handle calls efficiently, but not effectively.

On the ground, this meant that we saw employees transfer calls to other departments instead of solving the issues; we saw agents telling customers to do a complete re-install to solve the simplest of issues because it was a faster way for the agent to end the call, and we even saw agents hang up on customers.

SOURCE: beaconize.com