I have noticed that a few call centers use Average Handling Time (AHT) as a metric to judge the performance of their executives. Average Handling Time is the average duration of calls attended by the executives. The metric presumes that shorter the duration, better is the executive’s ability to handle a complaint i.e. lower AHTs imply that the executive is doing a great job. Consequently, several executives hang up on the customer midway through the call to improve on their performance metric. I recently encountered this problem with the Vodafone call center and the experience is extremely frustrating. This attitude runs counter to Vodafone’s pug ad in which they’ve painted themselves as committed to helping their customers.

The point I am making here is that certain metrics though seemingly logical may end up hurting your business. Metrics such as AHT are useful only when the employees aren’t aware of it. Otherwise, it can be manipulated and harm the business.

Twitter’s  ’Trending Topics’ suffers from this same problem.