Below is the continuation of a transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Performance Management in Government." The presenter is Christopher Wren, Principal Consultant at GPM.
Christopher Wren (CR): So the one tip is to rethink benchmarking, and the next tip is to spend right. In other words, let’s not overspend in some areas. A third would be summarized by this phrase “too simple to be accurate.” What we are talking about here is the common perception that any increase in performance in something like a phone system or a call center or any other output which would be represented on that horizontal axis on the bottom of the chart is good.
Any increase in service level will lead to an increase in outcomes. If we answer the phone more quickly, people will be happier. If we respond by mail in nine days instead of 10 days, that’s better. You know what? That’s not necessarily true. This very straight diagonal relationship we estimate on this chart is simply inaccurate. Let me show you what’s the real connection between driver change and expected change in outcomes.
You can see in the real world, you get a bump, and you can see that bump at about 75 where yes, if I answer the phone call in nine minutes instead of 10 minutes, people will be happier. But what if I spend extra money to bring that down to 8 minutes or 7 minutes it may not be worth the money because there may not be a correlation beyond a certain point between my service levels and changes in outcome.
So spending money in this case with these numbers on the bottom of the chart spending the extra money to go from 80 to 85 clearly isn’t worth it. It really doesn’t help you. So think about your correlation, your connections between expected change in outcome and service level, and if you have been just kind of going along with the notion that any change in service level is helpful and that any investment in service levels are worthwhile, that may not be actually true.
But let me show you some real examples of this. This is a state government call center and you can see here they are measuring percentage of calls abandoned while in queue at the call center. So in another words how many people are hanging up the phone? Currently they had about 10% of the people hanging up the phone. Well some day an executive came in and said, you know what, we have got to cut that in half. We have got to go from 10% to 5%.
Well, you know they looked at it again, and they knew that’s going to be very expensive. We are going to have to hire a lot more operators, we will have to invest in a new call center. Then we looked at it with this correlation and did an evaluation and said, you know what, getting to about 6.6% is probably good enough because beyond that additional spending to bring that number down had no change, no change in outcome. So again any additional spending from about 6.6% to 5% will be waste of money. You don’t really need to get down that low, so this belief that we have to somehow get a zero calls abandoned or a 100% success rate, that’s not necessarily true.
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