Metrics Drive Behaviors

Measuring the right or wrong items equally creates awareness, which influences behaviors.

It is easy to institute mechanical metrics to increase efficiency, which is another way of saying reducing costs in the customer service operation.  Although, on the surface, this appears to be a reasonable approach.  However, emphasizing those metrics may have the unintended consequence of actually reducing the most important metric of all – customer satisfaction.  Companies must carefully consider the behaviors of their customer service reps that will naturally occur as they attempt to meet the pre-established metric goals.  Will those behaviors help or hurt the overall satisfaction level of customers?