twenty-eightMEASUREMENT

MONDAY, JULY 15, 2002

"Thank you for calling Amazon.com, may I help you?" Then—Click! You're cut off. That's annoying. You just waited 10 minutes to get through to a human, and you mysteriously got disconnected right away.

Or is it mysterious? According to Mike Daisey, Amazon rated their customer service representatives based on the number of calls taken per hour.1 The best way to get your performance rating up was to hang up on customers, thus increasing the number of calls you can take every hour.

An aberration, you say?

When Jeff Weitzen took over Gateway, he instituted a new policy to save money on customer service calls. "Reps who spent more than 13 minutes talking to a customer didn't get their monthly bonuses," ...

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