I've worked in customer service software companies for the last 30 years, and one thing I can tell you is that average handle time is not a good metric to decide your success or failure on.
Having a low average handle time is easy. Just hang up on the customer. Or show them quickly that you won't do shit for them so that they hang up on you.
How about showing us those customer satisfaction and first call resolution scores?
Reminds me of my local Rally's switching to an "automated drive thru assistant." The jank thing doesn't even respond when you talk to it, just reminds you every 60 seconds that it's ready when you are. First time I went I drove off. Went a second time thinking it might have been a fluke and I'd get actual human service. Nope. Guess I'll be finding a new burger place for my hangovers
This is so true. The ability for human beings to game any metric you put out there is pretty legendary. I've seen it in action so many times. Measure people on a single metric and they will sacrifice every other aspect of your business to make that metric look good.
Reminds me of the story about the British India Company putting a bounty on snales to combat an infestation. People started breeding snakes to claim the bounties. When the government caught up to that, they stopped giving bounties for snales heads. So people released all their snakes into the wild, making the infestation worse than it was.
Isn't the GDP itself a roll-up of dozens or hundreds of other metrics, making it nigh impossible to game? Gaming the metric is the problematic part of identifying metrics to track performance being referred to.
No, GDP (gross domestic product) is an amount of money produced by states' economy. That's why you can have falling wages and lots of people in poverty yet if the stock market is doing well the government can boast how everything is just fine.
If the majority of the service requests are that quick, then it's probably something you can automate or by providing a knowledge base. It's the complex problems that require a human and I see us needing that for the foreseeable future