88.8% of statistics are made up on the spot

Or, why I hate my job some more

Governments are obsessed with statistics, quotas and league tables. Which is fine if you want to see who needs more funding to bring them up to speed; or if you want to close a centre, to find out who is underperforming.

Except not everything is measurable on a graph. Take customer service. OK so you can count official complaints. Or maybe average length of waiting time on the phone. But does this really provide an accurate ratio of disgruntled to gruntled customers? How do we measure customer happiness? If our customer is happy and everything is running smoothly, they do not call us. Should we presume no calls = good customer service?

I have to count the number of calls I experience everyday. I separate them into outgoing (successful), attempted and incoming. When they look at my performance in phone stats ten calls where the customer hung up within 10 seconds, count for more than a 1 hour conversations where we got enough information to complete the case. And why do I have a quoto for incoming calls? Surely this is dependant on people calling me - which if I have done my job right, they shouldn't.

Should I keep hanging up on a customer, and calling back? I'd have better performance stats. What comes first customer (officialy yes), or performance (unofficially yes).

If all centres are performing at peak, there will still be a bottom of the table. As us poor plebs see no bonus for hitting the top, why should we care. As long as we are doing our job to the best of our abilities, and we provide good customer service, stuff the stats.

Maybe that way our managers would do some work rather than compiling and interpreting tables.