When working for a major global company, I happened to pass a bunch of senior managers discussing the annual targets for Average Handling Time in a call centre.
Due to my natural curiosity I lingered to overhear the discussion. It went something like this.
“Right so we need a revised Average Handling Target (AHT) target for this year”
“My suggestion is we incorporate our continuous improvement target”
“Ok then we have a 10% improvement goal so let’s drop last year’s target by 10%”
“Right so last year’s Average Handling Target was 300 seconds, so this year we will knock 30 seconds from that?”
“That sounds too much, let’s call it 15 seconds and look for the other 5% somewhere else”
“At least that will cover half of it and if we only miss the target by 5% at least we can say we tried”
When I asked, I was told targets are set by the management team using their experience and knowledge of their people’s capability.
Once the revised targets had been in place for some time and interested to know how this would play out with the ‘front line’ I asked several teams for their approaches for dealing with this constraint. This is what they said.
“I hang up on the first 5 callers as soon as they are connected, this means I have long enough to deal with the next person”
“I make outbound calls to 0800 numbers and put my headset down” outbound calls aren’t measured.
“I just ignore the targets and try to do the best for the customer” this one was about to be disciplined for their ‘performance’.
“When we take calls handed on from another Agent, we get all of the information from the other agent before taking the customer. That gives me a chance to enter all of the information into the system and our AHT doesn’t start till we take the customer”
So, the phrase measurement drives behaviour couldn’t be more accurate in these examples.
Adam is an expert in applying system thinking to resolve many complex and difficult business problems for some of the world’s leading companies.