Delight your customers: The dark side of measuring the wrong things
Rory Sutherland of Ogilvie UK tells a beautiful story about a pizza shop whose owner decided to do some ‘marketing’. So, he printed a bunch of vouchers giving customers 20% off and sent his staff out onto the streets outside the store to promote the deal. The owner kept track of which staff were able to convert the vouchers best, and found that some came back with 20%, 30%, 40% customer conversion. But one waiter seemed to be particularly successful, and the metrics showed that he managed to convert 100% of customers. Every voucher he gave out resulted in a customer sale. Intrigued, the owner said, “This is genius! What did you do to achieve this.” “Oh, it was easy,” replied the waiter, “I just waited outside until a queue formed and gave everyone 20% off." It may be an amusing story, but I see this every day in my work with customer experience and customer loyalty. We are so focused on measurement and metrics, and we lose sight of what we’re trying to achieve.
In fact, this practice even has a name: Campbell’s Law, which was developed by Donald T. Campbell, a psychologist and social scientist who often wrote about research methodology. It is an adage which states that, "The more a metric is used to make social decisions, the more it will be manipulated and distorted." Thus, the more any quantitative social indicator is used for human decision making, and influencing people, the more subject it will be to corruption pressure and the more likely it will be to distort the precise things it is supposed to measure.
Here’s another example. Many years ago, a municipal manager responded to constant complaints by citizens that the garbage was not being collected properly and on schedule. So, he proposed that at the end of every trip the trucks would be weighed to ensure that the collectors were doing their job. You can guess what happened. The number of collection points didn’t increase, but the mass did. The collectors were going past construction sites and other places where the loads were heavier, and indeed, they even used the fire hydrants to water down what had been collected. The metrics showed that the mass increased, but customers were still unimpressed. Incentives drive actions – employees and customers react to what you measure, not what you intend.
This basically means that people will cheat, and that includes customers, employees and other stakeholders. They don’t do this because they have malevolent intentions, but simply because we spend most of our lives trying to make things as easy as we can. Life is too complicated to worry about details. And, as an aside, you have to also be very wary of staff who ask customers to give them a five-star review. It happens! Measuring the wrong thing can lead to unethical behaviour. I don’t have a problem with measuring things in business, even though they do sometimes have some horrible consequences to managers in the businesses. I know the manager of my local retailer bemoans the fact that ‘head office’ is always putting him under pressure to increase profitability.
But some metrics, especially those demanded by the CFOs and ‘scientists’ in our businesses, are irrelevant and misleading. And they can be dangerous. For example, the predominant wisdom in boardrooms is that empathy slows you down, but efficiency is profit. Yet this trade-off is a myth and is probably costing you customers – and even employees. And in the long term it’s costing you revenue. There are so many companies that ditch empathy for efficiency, and measure success by how quickly a customer vacates a table, or how soon a call ends, or a customer complaint is closed off. But when empathy becomes a ritual that must just tick a box, two consequences result: your customers leave because they are pressured, feel uncomfortable, and/or feel like they are merely a ‘transaction’. But your employees also burn out because they have to choose between customer care and compliance.
Read the full article here: Delight your customers: The dark side of measuring the wrong things
