Statistics like this should be used only to identify whether someone is performing at expected levels. Tuning compensation to it creates pressure to beat the statistics, which may not be the best way to serve your customers or employ your staff.
For example, one HelpDesk operator received 10 calls in an hour. He cuts a ticket as quickly as possible and gets out to answer the next call. As a result, the time from the inbound call to the second level call is reduced for all ten calls.
A second operator also receives 10 calls in an hour. She spends a few minutes in troubleshooting on 8 of the calls and as a result does not escalate five of those issues to second level. Her average time escalate an inbound call to second level is higher because she spent more time with the customer, who probably received better service. Yet the simple metric of time to escalation doesn't adequately measure her performance, which not only helped the customer right away, but left the second level staff out of the process, meaning they could work on other problems.
The first operator, having found the key to success, exploits the statistics for his own benefit. The second operator, concerned more with helping the customer, ends up hurting her performance review by not measuring up to the bar.
In a call center taking orders for Yanni's latest albumn, base statistics may provide a good floor for performance measurement. In a less cut-and-dried environment like a general Help Desk, where almost any question can get asked and expect an answer, statistics cannot measure the difficulty of the problem, the effort expended to resolve it, or the quality of the answer. You need more subjective information for that part of the evaluation.
"Hope springs eternal."
