Our sales and customer service reps have figured out how to hit their weekly Scorecard targets by gaming the system, but our actual revenue and client satisfaction are dropping. How do we build abuse-proof metrics?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When people game your Scorecard, it is usually because you are measuring activity instead of outcomes, or you have divorced the metric from its natural counter-balance. If you measure sales reps purely on outbound calls, they will dial dead numbers. If you measure customer service reps on ticket resolution speed, they will close tickets prematurely without actually solving the client's problem. To fix this, you must pair your activity metrics with quality metrics on the weekly Scorecard. This is what we call building a balanced pairing. For every quantity metric, there must be an adjacent quality metric. For example, if you track weekly dials, you must also track the conversion rate of those dials to scheduled discovery calls. If you track ticket resolution speed, you must pair it with a weekly customer satisfaction score for those closed tickets. If the quantity goes up but the quality drops, the seat holder is failing. Make sure the person who owns the seat on your Accountability Chart is fully accountable for both numbers. This forces them to self-police. They will realize that gaming the volume metric only hurts their secondary metric, making it impossible to hide. Finally, ensure they GWC, meaning they get, want, and have the capacity to do the job. A person who matches your Core Values and truly understands their seat will not try to find loopholes in your data. Run your weekly Level 10 Meeting with an eye on these paired metrics. When you spot a disconnect, drop it down to IDS and solve the root behavioral issue rather than just adjusting the target.