[Twirrim]

Speaking of wrong metrics, another anecdote:

I used to work for an ISP. Some genius high up in the support management chain decided that tickets were taking too long to resolve, and the touch rate was too high. So they implemented a way to measure how many times a ticket communicated on before it was resolved, and somehow turned that in to what they called a "conversion percentage". Percentage of what was never expressed.

The result, naturally, is that customers started talking to a void. Tickets took longer to resolve because the support engineers would waste time not asking clarifying questions because that would hurt their conversion percentage. Customer dissatisfaction soared.

A week or two after it went live, some engineers in the NOC team figured out that if you took a ticket, resolved it, and then re-opened it, you'd hit a 100% conversion rate, regardless of how you then communicated on it. Slowly but surely that started spreading through the company and things pretty much got back on track and customer satisfaction returned.

When I left, they were still tracking that conversion percentage, even though every support engineer was now taught during on-boarding that the way to handle a ticket was to resolve it and re-open it. Firmly on its way to becoming "it's just the way things are done"