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Planet Money had an episode on such metrics[0] The host shares a personal story from time when he was a cashier. The grocery chain measured performance as item
by yreg 6y ago
Planet Money had an episode on such metrics[0]
The host shares a personal story from time when he was a cashier. The grocery chain measured performance as items scanned per minute and shared internal leaderboard.
Some items are hard to scan so the cashiers ended up skipping scanning them – so the store gave them away for free. But the managers were happy about their KPIs. (Look how many items are we suddenly selling per minute!)
[0] - https://www.npr.org/transcripts/669396192 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/669396192 (both podcast and transcript)
I love this podcast.
- Cerium 6y agoCostco has such leader boards and keeps a separate board for part timers vs full time cashiers. I asked my friend who works there why the part time cashiers have a much higher (upwards of 2x) items per minute rate than the full time employees. Costco only schedules part time cashiers during busy hours where the lines are long and there are assistants getting the carts ready.
- cpeterso 6y agoI heard about a call center that rewarded customer service agents for short calls, so workers started immediately hanging up on some calls to bring their average call duration down.
- bombledmonk 6y agoI can verify this does happen in some call centers.
- throwaway987978 6y agoI swear this happened to me with Grubhub. I had a problem with my order and used their chat. After I wrote my problem the agent replied with a standard answer and then immediately: "Is there anything else I can help you with?" And then immediately after that: "No, ok I will close this chat."
- RotANobot 6y ago> I heard about a call center that rewarded customer service agents for short calls Almost all call centres reward agents for short calls.
- slim 6y agoThere's a target time. Something like 6 minutes. You can't just hang on customers
- thatoneuser 6y agoOf course you can hang up on customers. You just can't do it very often enough to get noticed.
- sib 6y agoSmart companies optimize something more like "percent of calls resolved on first contact" (or "1 - percent of calls requiring the customer to call back").
- Spooky23 6y agoThe supermarket I worked at in high school did this, but you usually didn’t get incentive pay if you worked less than 15 hours a week. The supervisors were pretty swift and always looking for shrink. If you were letting dog food or whatever walk out the door, they would figure it out quickly and you would be gone. The GMs were well paid and profitability and shrink were their metrics.