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Comment by yreg | Hacker News Reader

Planet Money had an episode on such metrics[0]

The host shares a personal story from time when he was a cashier. The grocery chain measured performance as items scanned per minute and shared internal leaderboard.

Some items are hard to scan so the cashiers ended up skipping scanning them – so the store gave them away for free. But the managers were happy about their KPIs. (Look how many items are we suddenly selling per minute!)

[0] - https://www.npr.org/transcripts/669396192 (both podcast and transcript)

I love this podcast.

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Costco has such leader boards and keeps a separate board for part timers vs full time cashiers. I asked my friend who works there why the part time cashiers have a much higher (upwards of 2x) items per minute rate than the full time employees. Costco only schedules part time cashiers during busy hours where the lines are long and there are assistants getting the carts ready.

I heard about a call center that rewarded customer service agents for short calls, so workers started immediately hanging up on some calls to bring their average call duration down.

I can verify this does happen in some call centers.

I swear this happened to me with Grubhub. I had a problem with my order and used their chat. After I wrote my problem the agent replied with a standard answer and then immediately:

"Is there anything else I can help you with?"

And then immediately after that:

"No, ok I will close this chat."

> I heard about a call center that rewarded customer service agents for short calls

Almost all call centres reward agents for short calls.

There's a target time. Something like 6 minutes. You can't just hang on customers

Smart companies optimize something more like "percent of calls resolved on first contact" (or "1 - percent of calls requiring the customer to call back").

The supermarket I worked at in high school did this, but you usually didn’t get incentive pay if you worked less than 15 hours a week.

The supervisors were pretty swift and always looking for shrink. If you were letting dog food or whatever walk out the door, they would figure it out quickly and you would be gone.

The GMs were well paid and profitability and shrink were their metrics.

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