More on Metrics.

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I realized, as I worked on this post, about Comcast, I have a lot to say about metrics. A whole lot. It's not an easy subject, and the corporate world loves metrics. Every middle manager in the country becomes flush at the sight of a report detailing the After Call Percent, the Labor Percent, and the time in queue. They are positively froth at the notion.

Now, I am going to upset a lot of people. Maybe I won't come off as an expert. I have a lot of experience with metrics. And before you say that studies show that metrics are the best performance measures we have, remember that whenever you say "best" you have to ask, for whom.

Metrics, in a lot of ways, are a justification. No company likes it's technical support division. This love-child of rapidly growing tech, coupled with furtive and error-prone tech, is a sinkhole for company money. I'd bet that half of R&D is basically just "make it less error prone."  It's certainly cheaper.

But as technology increased, Tech Support became the second sales associate. We were the soft sell. "Hey, thanks for buying out product. All technology, even that car, has issues. We know that it's inconvenient when it doesn't work, let's get it working right for you."

The flip side - it's a sinkhole for companies to offer free support. They'd charge but most customers suffer a disconnect - they see a technician fiddle some buttons and then the computer works. The technological "wizardry" is largely subtle. When you take your car in for  a repaire, they lift it up on blocks, pull out parts. It looks like work. It's easy to understand as actual skill.  When a technician rapidly scrolls through text, presses a few buttons, reboots your computer, there doesn't seem to be any substance.

So the company wants a profit on a department and the customer doesn't want to pay for what looks like crystal waving hoodoo. But tech support needs to exist.


So Technical support managers use metrics because to the executives, who care only for the bottom line and who listen only to bean-counters, need, desperately need, to know why this red mark exists in the the ledger of their exchequer. They see this entire department that has no income and they can seem to justify it.

I don't understand why. They happily understand exchange of money for goods, at least - they ought. Unless, they don't. When they take their ski trips, do they not pay people for food? For shelter? Why do they think the $30 dollar bottle of hair product is worth it? I mean, their computers need fixing too. I get frustrated that I have to buy cleaning supplies, but after living in some lichen-coated ogre-caves in my past, I wouldn't be caught dead without at least a bottle of bleach. .

Metrics, in this case, justify something that ought need no justification. Tech Support is the second customer service. Once the item has been sold, follow-up falls, mostly, on service. If service is handcuffed to metrics, or poorly staffed, or poorly paid, you lose your ability to create meaningful and important customer experience. Yes, you will have a trickle of naive and bright-eyed techs who will begin the job with open-hearts. But your system will turn them into cowering, mumbling misanthropes in six months. And then, you'll need a retention team.

My point is exactly this: Metrics should never cost the customer experience. The customer experience needs to be managed. If you manage the customer they will have a bad experience.

Truth is, metrics are not all bad. On the contrary, someone I admire, Jon Taffer, uses a type of metric called analytics. He touts the "science of the bar business." He uses these metrics to aid the bar in increasing profit. But bars make money by improving and lengthening the positive customer experience. It's may sometimes come off as if you your chairs are 5 cm higher then profits increase 10%, but only because on TV, they edit and use shorthand. Bars make money on happy, well-served, pleasantly-buzzed-and-entertained customers. If a metric increases short-term profit for a bar at the cost of long term customers - then it isn't used.

Growth under the current system that puts profit first will fall. Profit is important, despite my difficulty understanding work, I can understand profit.

Good service, a good product, and good follow-up, is not a detriment to service. You don't make profit and then, as an afterthought, offer a good experience, or an experience.  You don't begrudgingly slough off to work, petulant and angry like a spoiled child, (or yours truly). You don't try to mitigate it as a "unfortunate and unintended consequence."

You offer a service and a good experience, and, in trade, you are provided other services or goods, or the shorthand, money.

Imagine! Imagine the bar that, as a a consequence, has nice lighting and a dance floor. "What do you mean, we have to have good liquor and clean bars? I just want to sell drinks!" or  a Pizza place? "Quality ingredients? Psh! Just sell them them ground up cardstock!*" How many people would be impressed by an executive with unwashed hair and a ratty suit? 

And, as  customers go elsewhere (assuming they can - Telecoms have the system locked up). You are left with needing "Retention specialists", basically glorified beggars and strong-arm experts who's sole purpose is to keep your unhappy customers on the hook.  You are no better than some back alley clip joint.

If you need metrics to justify your position, you haven't adequately managed your value. And if you need, god help you, an extortionist in "retention." then you aren't providing a service worth retaining.



* I am talking to you Pizza Hut.  Little Caesar's tastes better. And it's cheaper. You should be ashamed. 

** It's just me, but I put on a spiffy bowler and a monocle.

The Comcast Effect.

I seem, very much, to be in a tizzy over the economy - specifically how we work, why we work, and what we work on. I think the whole system, created by industrialization, has turned like some modern-day ouroboros, onto itself. The mechanization and industrialization has ran away with regulations (and de-regulations) all in the wrong places. It's left the free market, good work, and the lower-class gasping in the dust.

As for the middle class, our current legislative body, from fed to state, and often local, stabbed it in 2002, it just took this long for it to bleed out. The middle class barely had tiem to gasp "Et tu?"

The ever-increasing hatred of Comcast is a bandwagon that has perhaps circle. Recordings and interviews  making the rounds, showing us the madness of the Comcast system. And regardless of claims to the otherwise, Comcast knows about and encourages it.
In fact, I feel like translating the Comcast apology:

We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and Ms. Belmont and are contacting them to personally apologize.

 Translation: We are so busted. This is just like when mom caught me stealing as a child. I had to go, apologize, and promise to pay back the shopkeeper. So now we have to apologize even though the candy we stole was delicious. Lame 

 The way in which our representative communicated with them is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives.

Translation: We do not precisely train our CSRs like this. In fact, it's not until they get on the call center floor where we discreetly discuss metrics. We reinforce these metrics at their 30- and 60-day reviewt

We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. 

Translation:   So, we know what's up and we will handle it in-house by completely ignoring it and.or firing the employee. 

While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.

 Translation: This happens all the time, but we will add an extra ten minutes in training to discuss how much we care about our customers so we can update the published date on our training materisl. We'll make it look like an overhaul by paying people way more money than they ought to rewrite the language of our training materials.

(As a mercenary who doesn't have apersonal beef with Comcast, I'd like to say to them: I am up to the rewrite job, and my fees are reasonable. It's will be $10,000 a month. You can bundle that with my $5000  a month  consulting and my $3000 cartooning. Now separately you'd pay 18 grand for all that, but with introductory bundling, I can get you two for $9000 or all 3 for only $6000 for 6 months!  What a deal!)*

 Sometime in the past we gave up on the simple idea of good products and services. There used to be this process. You made a product or a service, then shared it and exchanged it for money. if the product and/or service was good, and you were reasonable, you would get returns and some profit. Industrialization was, supposedly, simply an extension. of this.

But something went sideways. We stopped looking at return customers and happy customers as signs of good work and started engineering opinions. We sent out surveys. And the surveys said things like 'the call was too long" or "they didn't fix the problem and I had to call again."  And we valued signing up new customers, at any cost. We added flow lists and databases and metrics because we thought the science and data backed it up. And it did, to a point. 

But we stopped offering service, and offering to do the jobs, and starting managing the customer. Not his expectations, but them. We forgot that all the data in the world isn't giving the customer what they want or need. 

The fact is, while it's true that no sane or honest business owner goes into the game to lose money, the profit - the bottom line, comes from relationships, and connections.

Rather than asking "What can we do to help the customer?' We ask: "Can we make the customer happy in 6 minutes." Then we ask "Can we finish the call in 6 minutes to help the next person, and can we make them wait in a queue."

I have discussed this before here.

Comcast is not alone. I worked for a small Telecom, TDS. I was a pretty solid employee,but I had a problem. I wanted customers to be helped. I want to solve their problem and make sure they didn't need to talk to me again.
Did some of the customers need multiple things? Yes. That, at first, didn't bother me. Did some customers ask me for things outside my scope of support? certainly - I explained that I could help, or couldn't. If I could help, I said other agents might not be able to help.

I had excellent customer service. But in the world of metrics and numbers, this was unacceptable. And the simple answer is because our managers were so divorced from the customer and the process that they couldn't even understand good customer service, and why their metrics were detrimental to the people on the floor. Customer Service Representatives breaking out in a sweat when the difficult call takes very long. raises lost to skewed averages and you miss a metric.  

All companies do this. Marco's Pizza did this. Measuring the time to make pizza, the time in the oven, the time on cut and time out the door. All of these do, in fact affect customer service. But, in the end, the only thing that really matters is the quality of the pizza and the good customer experience.  At Marco's Pizza, the management is not distant from the customer. If a customer is happy, metrics are loosened. If a customer is unhappy, no amount of metrics repair it.

Metrics tell very little about the customer experience. It is a game of testing boundaries - how much can we get away with in our search for profit and speed and still have a positive experience.

It seems insane. In order to give a "positive experience" I had to not do all the things that made an experience positive.

Now the same telecom sent all their tech jobs to uneducated Jamaicans, costing the US jobs and giving a worse customer experience.

Madness and bad customer experience in a search for profit. No company went out of business by building positive relationships.

Something has happened. Industrialization and profit-hunting have become metric chasing. Desperate attempts to show your job is relevant by explaining why your imaginary measurements are good measurements. That the science of profit, time management, and efficacy replaced the ability to craft a good customer experience.


*Comcast must sign a 12 month contract. After 6 months the introductory rate become $19,999 a month. Early termination fees apply.

My FCC comment.

 In light of net neutrality (I.E. Comcast F*cking the Internet), I conntected the FCC and commented thus:

"Simply put, the telecoms, all of which are thinly-veiled actual monopolies, cannot be trusted with the Internet. They use strong arm tactics and bullying, both on providers like Netflix, and on customers attempting to extricate them from the service. In no way can we trust them to ensure the fast lane/slow lane service will be priced fairly.

Our Internet lags behind many other countries, only because the monopolies - sorry - telecoms do not want to provide better service. They want to profit, and ignobly. "Get the mostest and offer the leastest." It would be comical if it weren't so true.

When we came to this country, a man or woman could make good in this country by simply carving out a part of the public land. The Internet is the new frontier, and technology the way to freedom. My giving this power to the telecomonopolies, you are denying the will to prosper of the United States.  New blogs, new stores, new industry using the logistics and the easy messaging of the Internet to make money, for themselves and for the government.

How many Internet business will we lose because access is only by slow lane? How many subscribers will quit Netflix and use libraries to get movies? The unintended costs of letting telecomonopolies introduce lanes will be staggering as it deincentivizes Internet use and Internet commerce. Economically it will be a disaster. Does that matter to you? the GDP used to matter, does it anymore? What happened to being a country of producers?

The media is woefully inadequate and untrustworthy. Pictures of George Zimmerman were lightened. His 911 call, manipulated. An informed public cannot trust television and radio sources.  Several news agencies have outright said they are biased, and one even won a lawsuit, claiming they didn't even have to tell truth. But on the Internet, where information is free, the truth can be found. And even if it requires digging through stacks of useless cat pictures and diatribes, I do it gladly to find out facts - something other media outlets often lacks.

By giving in to the telecomonopolies, you are taking steps to ensure that we cannot find any truth but the one most well liked by the corporations. What's next, a firewall to prevent us from knowing things outside Oceania? That would certainly prevent the spread of crimethink.

If an appeal to your nobler capitalist side side does not dissuade you, let me then try your more ignoble, despotic side.

Fast, inexpensive Internet is literally circuses. Imagine, if you will, a society of people who have access to cat pictures all day. With the incredible amount of slacktivism today, don't you think it would be wise to let people speak out on the Internet. They will spend their time lamenting with Facebook E-cards and never be so idle as to pick up protest placard and brick.

Open up the internet, and we will immerse ourselves in hedonistic voyeurism, and leave you alone. Close it down, and our idle hands will have to find something to do. Maybe rallying against a corrupt government is just the thing to get us off our Netflix-deprived couch-sitting asses."

I am not a lawyer, my language may be colloquial - I am a blogger and would-be demagogue. But if enough us remind them that the internet is useful, as a tool of information for us, or, at the very least, an easy leash for our masters - they may realize what a terrible idea Comcasts lanes will be.

Go here:  http://www.fcc.gov/comments and comment on 14-28