I got a good laugh today when I saw an article on sneaky tricks that some companies play. An outsourced call center was bragging about how they completed calls 20%-30% faster than their competition. As it turns out, the secret was that they were simply hanging up on customers, using the old “Just try this, and if it doesn’t work, then call back” game — and not even bothering to get the customers’ agreement before terminating the call. The reason I laughed was that many years ago, in the course of an Operational Review I did for a software company’s Customer Support group, I found a similar “Metrics Manipulation” scenario.
The First Call Closure Rate That Wasn’t
In my initial interview with the VP of the group, I was assured that they had a 93% First Call Closure rate. I nodded politely and proceeded to the group area to listen in on some calls — a practice I *strongly* recommend for *all* C-level officers of *all* companies, for you hear things on that hotline you just don’t hear anywhere else! After a few hours and some more interviews, I met again with the VP. I requested that the database administrator join us as well, and asked them to do a probe of the database to find customer records where there were multiple calls into Support within the same day. We then examined them, and found that virtually all of them were in fact about the same issue. The reps had been using the same dodge to get off the call and to close the case. When the customer called back unsatisfied, a new case record was created.
The VP was aghast. “I’m speaking at an industry conference in a week about how we got that 93% FCC rate! What can I do?” My advice to him was to tell the truth about the stat, and then talk about what he put in play after he made the discovery — as that would have a far better impact on the audience.
The End of Abandons?
Another case was of a CEO who was outraged to find that his company’s Abandon rate (callers that hang up before connecting to an agent) was high. The Imperial Wand was waved, and the Pronouncement issued that henceforth and forever more, There Would Be No Abandons At That Company, Or Heads Would Roll. Surprise! As of 0900 the next morning and thereafter, there in fact were no more abandons. How was this magic accomplished? The system admin simply went into the phone switch programming and changed the definition of a Abandon to be: callers that waited on hold for more than 72 hours before hanging up.
The moral of the story is: be sure that you are actually measuring what you think you are, and that the metric really is relevant to what you are trying to accomplish.
