Aerlinthian posted:
I work very closely with a large delivery service.
And none of the large carriers like seeing stuff like this. Don't believe me? Go apply for a job with a large one and you will sit through several hours of package handling and safety videos as part of your orientation.
In a way, I disagree. You will get what you incentivize. If you optimize and micromanage down to the minute, and push absurd quotas through that are at best optimistically naive, then employees will do horrible things to try to keep up no matter how much a company bleats about quality.
I see companies over and over again giving lip service to quality, but not actually DOING anything about it. For example, complaints of package mistreatment are widespread. We have accelerometers and other devices to measure things like how many g's a package is subjected to, why are UPS / FedEx etc. not making full use of these? At the end of the day, I'm willing to be that they don't, because the truth would be ***expensive as hell*** because it would show a problem that is expensive to fix.
Popular Mechanics posted:
"FedEx and UPS logged an average of three and two big drops per trip, respectively. FedEx delivered the most big bumps, with an average of three acceleration spikes over 6 g's (equivalent to a 2.5-foot drop) per trip. One disheartening result was that our package received more abuse when marked "Fragile" or "This Side Up."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/tests/which-shipping-company-is-kindest-to-your-packages
Maybe I'm overreacting in this instance. Its possible that the reality is that people do not properly pack what they ship, and that the shipping companies don't want to meet that reality face to face, because the result would just be like calling customers stupid. I guess I can sort of accept that possibility. If the expectation is that the package will be dropped several times over the course of shipping, then that should be made clear IMO.
I drove a Drexel (a large forklift with a swiveling mast) and we had a quota that was such that we drove like maniacs just to meet it when things got busy. The quota assumed things like an empty location at destination (huge difference between an empty rack and one with an empty pallet, and a pallet with shrink wrap that you have to remove). I'm honestly surprised we didn't kill anyone.
I've seen multiple call centers that do in house QA. I'm sorry, that's a conflict of interest. If you outsource, YOU do the QA not the company you outsource to (or at least outsource it to a "neutral" third party!). Anything else is just asking for it. I had a Corporate QA manager tell us to just drop low QA scores for calls one time. I asked him "So you want us to lie?" They didn't like that question at all.
Going further, this same jobs QA requirements were about "Did you say the persons last name 3 times", "Did you brand the company in the call opening?", "Did you say the call closing?" The actual technical QA requirements were not only almost absent, but the people doing the QA were not qualified technically to do so (because QA was the company black hole).
You know what got pushed? AHT, and FCR. Worse, people gamed FCR by lieing to customers in inventive ways and coding tickets in ways to avoid callbacks resulting in FCR issues.
