“Please proceed to disconnect our service.” tech journalist Ryan Block repeated for the 12th time in his attempt to cancel his Comcast subscription over the phone. On the other end of the line, a Comcast retention rep was using every tactic he could to get Block to explain why he’s leaving the company after 9-years as a customer. Block doesn’t relent and after 18 grueling minutes of back-and-forth, the call ends.
The recording of this call made circles around the Internet as an example of how lousy customer service has become. Shortly after the recording surfaced, Comcast publicly apologized, saying it was embarrassed by this particular employee’s actions and swiftly fired the retention rep.
It sure is great to see a company acting quickly and taking action, right?
Well, as consumers, it might be satisfying to see justice being served, knowing that sometimes we all get into frustrating situations with organizations we do business with, but for the employees in many of today’s organizations, its really not that simple, and here’s why.
What you actually heard on the call is a little extreme, granted. The rep did go overboard and by no means was he justified in his approach, it was just too over the top. But if you listen close, what you hear isn’t someone just trying to be a smart-ass. It is about a human being that was likely fighting hard to keep his job; perhaps so he can pay the rent or put some food on the table for his family.
Why was he fighting so hard? Slate magazine’s interview with a former Comcast employee reveals that the majority of an employee’s pay actually depends on hitting a metric for customer retention.
“In retention, the more products you save per customer the better you do, and the more products you disconnect the worst you do (if a customer with a triple play disconnects, you get hit as losing every one of those lines of business, not just losing one customer). These guys fight tooth and nail to keep every customer because if they don’t meet their numbers they don’t get paid. According to Slate’s interview, Comcast uses “gates” for their incentive pay, which means that if you fall below a certain threshold then instead of getting a reduced amount, you get 0$. “
Managers living in an age obsessed with assessment and control have popularized the phrase “What gets measured gets done”. Indeed, work may get done, but at what cost? Many jobs today are very closely quantified and tracked against expectations. We forever look for the perfect metric: the most objective way to define, measure, and reward success in a given arena. But there’s a tragic flaw in this hardheaded approach in that it ignores everything else, namely, doing the right thing and practicing common sense.
For example, in the 1960s, Police departments that rewarded high arrest rates managed to book more suspects, but often failed to improve public safety. The more a given metric is used to evaluate performance in some domain, the less reliable it becomes as a measure of overall success. Why? The people whose performance is being measured will neglect other parts of their job just to focus on boosting the relevant numbers, ignoring everything else, sometimes to the point of cheating.
Having a ‘metric mentality’ reduces any variability and removes much of the judgment needed from most jobs. Our most valuable employees, the ones who represent our company to our customers, are given detailed manuals by which they are trained and expected to follow almost word-for-word when they speak with customers. Metrics are used to monitor and rate performance according to how well they follow the process.
There’s nothing wrong with measurement. Having and using data is really awesome and useful, but we have to be careful in making sure it is used for the right purpose. We all know the world isn’t black or white, especially when it comes leading people, it is always situational and lacks context. There’s a difference between using data to empower and using data to disempower or control.
Data that empowers inspires ownership, collaboration, and a bias-for-action is something we all need in order to meet the needs of today’s customers. It creates a platform for change and continuous improvement. If there’s one organization that’s obsessed with data, it’s Google. In his recent book “Work Rules”, Laszlo Bock, Google’s head of People Operations shares his professional insights from his experience at Google: “If you give people freedom, they will surprise, delight and amaze you. They will also sometimes disappoint you, but if we were perfect we wouldn’t be human. This isn’t an indictment of freedom, It’s just one of the trade-offs”
Giving people freedom is about using data to guide, improve and coach. That’s what leadership is about. It is so much more powerful than holding someone’s feet to the fire in a “what’s get measured gets done” mentality. It promotes trust through transparency and open dialogue, and most importantly, it motivates us to take action.
To become an adaptive organization and handle today’s pace of change, we need our people delighting and amazing our customers. We need to create an environment where common sense consistently prevails and not forsaken so a single meaningless metric can be met. It is time to use metrics to empower and inspire!
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