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Comment by rtkwe | Hacker News Reader

When I was first coming out of college interviewing I got a tiny taste of it interviewing for a company that made software for controlling and analyzing the performance of a call center and one of the weird sideways things they talked about doing was automatically dropping some calls to help call centers meet their metrics because a call sitting in a queue forever might mess up their wait time stats but dropping it and the person calling back let operators hit the reset button on the timer.

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Oh, I once worked at a place with a similar system. If they waited long enough in the queue, their call would get disconnected (hopefully they heard a message saying to call later) and a counter went up for the number of times that it happened. I think you needed to wait at least 30 minutes for it to happen.

Thankfully most of the time the queue wasn't ever ridiculously long (10 minutes wait time at probably the 95th percentile) customers, with 3-50 agents available depending on the previous year's traffic.

It was a good environment for a high school student. When it got super busy no one in the office was above getting on the phones.

So I guess at that point "wait time" just becomes a vanity metric? Or to show their clients "we only make callers wait X amount of time compared to our competitors"?

I think it does become a vanity metric at that point at least in terms of actually successfully improving customer experience. For their clients though it was an extremely valuable thing to be able to game because it could determine if they made a bonus payment or not.

There's the old adage that as soon as a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a good metric because it starts to be gamed. It's probably not universally true but it shows up again and again in things like NYC's COMPSTAT program where a decent idea becomes a goal without measuring the right thing and you wind up with police just harassing people because you've gotta get the number of arrests up or you'll look bad at the next COMPSTAT review.

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