Does the pig get fatter because you weigh it? Will rats go away because you count their tails? Always ask yourself those questions when you deal with KPIs in customer service centers.
When I was a child, I often spent summers at my grandparents’. They were country people; they lived in a thatched farmhouse, they had a cowshed, a pigsty, fields of wheat, a collie named Molly … everything a young townie like me could ask for.
Summer after summer I scurried around on the farm, reeking of manure and pesticides, and I enjoyed every second. Especially the freedom to explore.
One summer I’d found a tape measure in my granddad’s shed. Armed with the tape measure, I went about measuring everything. For example, I measured the wheat several times a day to see if it had grown.
During one of those wheat measurements, my grandmother had sneaked up on me. Suddenly she was there, and while she wiped her hands in her apron, she said the magic words:
“The pig doesn’t get any fatter, just because you weigh it …”
True enough: I kept measuring and measuring the wheat, but that didn’t make it grow.
After a long and hard life on the farm, my grandmother shunned the unnecessary and pointless: “You’re wasting your time running around measuring everything, just because you can …”
And now over to customer service …
My grandmother’s words have stayed with me ever since – not least today, when I, among lots of other things, deal with software for collecting statistics in customer service centers.
One of the things that everyone wants statistics about is their service center’s ability to live up to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
But … when you measure KPIs, you need to think. Otherwise, you risk what happened when the mayor decided to count rats’ tails in the 1820s:
To cut down the number of rats in town, the mayor decided to offer a reward for each rat’s tail that people handed in. His assumption was that to get the tails, people would have to kill the rats. However, it didn’t take long before the town’s enterprising people actively began to breed rats to get more tails. When they’d cut of the tails, they didn’t want heaps of dead rats in their houses, so they let the rats loose.
So, the number of rats in the town went up because the mayor wanted to collect and count their tails in order to bring the number down.
The mere fact that you measure something may in some cases affect what you measure. That’s also the case when you measure the quality of your customer service:
Let’s assume that your customer service team recently got a new and more ambitious KPI for how long customers should wait before an agent answered their inquiries.
Even though the new KPI was harder to meet than the one you had before, your team has been able to meet it: You’ve changed the way you work and become able to handle inquiries more quickly than before. That in turn has made waiting times go down. Good work!
Yes, if you’ve made the changes in a sound and sensible way.
- For example, you may have streamlined processes by integrating relevant systems with your service center software, so your agents automatically have all relevant customer data handy when they answer a call, without having to go in and out of different programs, take notes, copy/paste data, etc.
- You may of course also have hired more staff or begun to utilize your existing personnel better, because you’ve optimized opening hours and duty rosters based on advanced statistics.
- Perhaps you’ve changed queue configurations and call distribution mechanisms, so more calls go straight to the best possible agents with the right skills, so that you need fewer time-consuming call transfers.
There are a lot of things you can do that really make sense when you want to reduce waiting times. Zylinc can help you with all of them – perhaps with the exception of hiring more people …
However, you may also end up doing things that make less sense …:
- What if your ability to live up to the new and harder KPI was a result of you having begun to treat callers more cursorily, without attention to detail?
If your customer service ends up being superficial and sloppy because agents must hastily close calls in order to answer the next one, have you the necessarily achieved something positive by being able to live up to the KPI?
In the extreme, some customers might even need to call customer service again, if they didn’t get all the answers they needed in the first place, because the agents were so eager to end the calls. In that case, your KPI could have a negative self-perpetuating effect:
The agents’ attempts to meet the KPI by handling calls as quickly as possible would generate more calls, which would in turn put pressure on the agents to handle calls even more quickly, etc., etc.
Am I exaggerating? Possibly, but I think it proves that you need to carefully consider possible spillover effects of your KPIs.
I once visited a customer service team that often handled calls from a number of regular customers. Some weeks prior to my visit, the team had decided to cut down on the personal touches (like “How are you, dear?” “How old are Jack and Amelia these days?” “Really; they grow up so fast, don’t they?”) to cut seconds off each handled call, and consequently reduce waiting times.
They had KPIs for both, and the decision did indeed help them come closer to meeting those KPIs. That was viewed as a win-win situation for everybody.
However, a customer satisfaction survey later showed that customers valued the personal touch higher than saving, as it were, an average of seven seconds of waiting time.
In fact, most of the survey’s respondents hadn’t noticed the shorter waiting times at all, but they certainly had noticed that the once very friendly agents had become snappish and dismissive. The customers didn’t appreciate that …
So, while the team’s ability to meet the KPIs had gone up, customers’ perceptions of the team’s service had gone down.
I’m fully aware that in customer service centers with a high volume of calls, every second of waiting time counts, also when it comes to customer satisfaction. My examples just go to illustrate that you should always weigh the benefits of being able to live up to KPIs against the potential downsides—and those downsides can sometimes come as a surprise, unless you have a thorough knowledge about how your customers and other stakeholders think and act.
You see, the pig doesn’t get any fatter, just because you weigh it. You need to carefully consider what you want to achieve with your KPI measurements, and then you need to consider the pros and cons of what you do to live up to the KPIs.
Morten Müller is Documentation & Localization Manager at Zylinc’s HQ in Denmark.