Measure, measure, measure

Three New Jobs – I want to focus on one of them: the Stats Fiend. You should be measuring almost everything in a business, actually I would say start looking at your life too! Like all things though, there can be too much of a good thing, and if emphasis is placed on the wrong stats, you can go traipsing down a very lonely and useless path. One glaring example that came to mind recently was a lot of customer service organizations obsession with a wonderful metric: “average time on a call”. In the appropriate situation, this metric can lead you down a path of discovery about aspects of your product or service that need attention. By looking at the relationship between time spent on calls and the reason the customer called in, you may find reps need additional training, or that your product or service is broken in some serious way. Unfortunately, all too often the metric is used to punish reps who try and help customers. Reps are rewarded for “getting the customer off the phone” so they can handle more calls per hour meaning less reps need to be hired, costs go down and all is right with the world! Uhh, no. There is a huge difference between data and information. Collect all of the data you can, but look carefully at the information you synthesize from it.]]>