As we’re approaching the festive season I’ve been offered some prize Community Site real estate to impart some truly exciting news on the plans that one of Santa’s performance-focused management elves has developed as a Christmas Incentive for the CSC here at Plusnet Towers.
We have it on good authority from Santa’s list of who’s been naughty and nice that there are going to be plenty of 802.11n wireless routers, dongles and shiny new MacBooks beautifully wrapped and nestling beneath Christmas trees this year. So we anticipate that we’ll be getting a few calls from stressed-out customers who’ll need a little bit of extra help (but remember if you can get online, our Support Pages offer a wealth of information!)
To ensure that we’re in tiptop shape to handle this influx, we’re going to need to work a little bit smarter, so Santa has agreed to lend us 6 of his reindeer to help drive performance. Each one will be assigned to a team in the CSC, and we’ve given this novel scheme the imaginative title of ‘Reindeer Races’, or ‘Racing Reindeer’ depending on which PowerPoint slide you’re looking at. Depending on how well we do, Santa will reward our seconded reindeer based on a range of performance metrics, including:
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top performing team per week
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ensuring all analysts hit target each day for the shift pattern
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timekeeping – ensuring less than 2% lates per week
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maintaining CAR at above 85% (this is the number of calls we handle - the Call Answer Rate)
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keeping the longest call wait below 10 mins
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retaining customers
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attaining over 110% performance for the week
To give you a bit more background on where we’re going with this, our caribou contrived catalyst is based upon the concept of ‘Reindeer Dust’ – which is something those of you who can remember the mid 1980’s Christmas caper ‘Santa Claus: The Movie’ will understand without further explanation. In fact, the less we discuss said highlight of American cinema, the better. Moving swiftly on…
So, each week Santa will distribute to the top performing substitute Saami several bags of reindeer dust based upon performance, and at the end of the races we anticipate that there’ll be one, pre-eminent bunch of support analysts who’ll be enjoying an exceptional, un-Scrooge-like festive period with their reindeer in tow.
Now, for the tricky maths part. Each performance indicator attracts a certain remuneration, ranging from a paltry 5 bags of dust for achieving the Herculean feat of keeping the CAR above 85%, to a stonking 20 bags of dust for the comparably effortless cakewalk of attaining 110% team performance across a shift pattern. The elves over at Lapland bank (it must be on the verge of collapse if it’s taking dust as deposits, however magical) will then convert 100 bags of reindeer dust into a crisp £20 for the victors to spend on a team building event ranging from the humble takeaway to more profligate pastimes such as go-karting or paintballing days out.
One final note before we start – Santa’s not releasing his First Team of Reindeer as he needs these fresh for Christmas Eve. So we’re currently sat with Reindeer Team A, B, C, Faults, Sales and Customer Service; but they’re sulking a bit and we need to cheer them with new names. If any of you creative lot have any suggestions please do let us know.
Update 28/11/2008
It's time for a quick update on the progress of our reindeer round the Top Gear, sorry, our track. We've finally settled on names for each team, and here are the current scores:
- 85 bags of dust - Team C - ***POW***
- 75 bags of dust - Business Support - The Stig
- 65 bags of dust - Team B - Swiety Mikolaj
- 65 bags of dust - Team A - Laina Oj Marksman 3rd
- 55 bags of dust - Faults - Fruitcake
- 45 bags of dust - Retentions - Captain Censored
- 45 bags of dust - Customer Services - Predrito
Initially The Stig was out in front, but after a bit of recalculating for stable sickness it appears that ***POW*** pinched the Pagani Zonda Roadster F to take first place, and poor old Captain Censored and Predrito got lumbered with a slow old Bugatti Veyron.
Thanks for reading
Andy