RBeeGee

I will never understand why working class people fight tooth and nail to defend billionaires

Amazon's internal metrics said customers waited under 60 seconds for customer service. Jeff Bezos picked up the phone in a meeting and waited more than 10 minutes. The head of customer service had been defending the number. Bezos said "Ok, let's call." He dialed Amazon's 1-800 line on speaker. The room sat there for over ten minutes before a rep answered. The metric didn't survive the meeting. Bezos has a saying: when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. Metrics don't measure reality. They measure what you designed them to measure. Customer service dashboards commonly filter out abandoned calls, cap hold time at the IVR timeout, and start the clock after the menu tree completes. Every one of those choices pushes the average down. The customers hanging up at minute 9 are not in the denominator. The 60-second number was technically accurate and practically wrong. That call broke through a defended metric in a way no spreadsheet could have. The head of CS had dashboards and a team whose job was to report that number going down quarter over quarter. Bezos had 10 minutes of hold music and a room full of people watching. This is the executive test almost nobody runs. Call your own 1-800 line. Try to buy your own product in incognito. Every senior leader can do it in under 15 minutes. Almost none do, because the dashboards feel like the truth and the dashboards say things are fine. The measurement got redesigned. Wait times actually fell. When your data says you're winning and your customers say you're losing, the customers are right. The data was built by people whose job depends on it going down.