More from the Department of Empirical Good News

For the new fiscal year, which began on February first, Auric technicians’ metrics got changed.  Until now, we were measured on Average Handle Time (talk time plus hold time plus after-call wrap-up), dispatch rate (percentage of case logs that end by sending out parts or on-site service), and repeat dispatch rate—the number of dispatches where someone else had to send out parts or on-site service again for the same issue, within seven days of my dispatch, as in “I didn’t fix it.”  In other words, two finance-driven bean-counter measures and one quality-of-work measure.  Using those yardsticks, I stayed buried in the center of the pack for my call center (techs are measured against one another, not against an arbitrary standard number someone thought up).  I ran around number 100 of 185 or so.

Fortunately for me, this year’s Big Initiative in our part of the house involves trying to raise our customer satisfaction rate by more than fifteen percent, so the measures got revamped.  The new measures are minutes per resolution (inbound talk plus outbound talk plus after-call), net incident resolution rate (calls that stay closed after I touched them), and RD rate, which carried over from last year.  All three are measures of work quality, not of the number of beans I can count in a day.  Management also decided to make the pot we’re comparing against a LOT bigger, so now I’m being measured not only against performance of my own call center, but of all level-one techs at all three Auric centers.  Instead of 185 techs, the pot now has between 450 and 500.

And here’s the best part.  Since the new standards went into effect, I’ve shot up from number 100 of 185 to anything between numbers 40 and 75 of 450, depending on which week’s data you looked at.  I’m a top-quartile performing employee, and I haven’t changed a thing about the way I work.  I’m handling calls today exactly the way I did last year, but now my style of call handling has come into fashion, and I sure do look at lot better when you look at me that way.  And if I can continue like that, it’ll make mid-year review in September a lot more pleasant.  (Not that prior reviews been unpleasant before now; far from it!  It’s just nice to be recognized for doing well at what you do well.)