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Adrianne Jefferies reports about the pressure on Comcast customer service
employees with respect to retaining customers and how their monthly income
could be greatly affected by the loss of services. Jefferies reports that “metrics-
obsessed reps are . . . trying to reach a predetermined outcome in the call, and
they're trying to do it in under 11 minutes. Comcast has turned its customer
service reps into sales reps.” Even when customers explicitly tried to cancel
their service, they found difficulty.
In another setting, a president of a private liberal arts college was hyper-
focused on increasing enrollment and lost sight of other important metrics.
Increasing enrollment is important for a variety of reasons and had worked for
him at a previous institution. In his mind, increasing enrollment meant increas-
ing revenue, which would lead to new programs and pay for new buildings.
Everybody at the college was soon busily increasing the number of students
applying, admitted, and enrolling. Tuition was significantly discounted in year
one to attract students with competitive financial aid and merit scholarships.
This hyper-focus led to more students in the short-run. Meanwhile, little atten-
tion was paid to retention.
Without the capacity to properly handle the new students, students became
frustrated by the inability to get into the classes they wanted, overcrowded first
year dormitories, and reduced financial aid in subsequent years. Consequently,
the 6-year graduation rate dropped. Revenue gains by increasing the freshman
class were soon lost by students transferring or dropping out. The board lost
confidence in the president and a leadership change was made.
Hospital leadership can also become hyper-focused on a single metric to
the detriment of other metrics. One hospital, for example, had an internal
issue with hospital-acquired sepsis, a life-threatening infection. Concerned,
hospital educators created competencies around hospital-acquired sepsis
for all nurses. Continuing education focused on sepsis and the chief nursing
officers held lunch-and-learn sessions. Awareness was raised and patient out-
comes improved. However, although sepsis decreased, urinary tract infections
increased. Attention paid to one infection type meant attention diverted from
another. One chief nursing officer lamented, “You can have your team focus
only on so many things.”
As a result of metric fixation, thought leaders have tried to introduce broad
concepts that measure and score all underlying metrics. In healthcare, for
example, patient experience is a new metric that healthcare providers are begin-
ning to measure. Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and
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