ABSTRACT
The customer service reps had been given a goal of “handling 100 calls per day.” While the organization did perform customer surveys, feedback was so sporadic that it was hard to get a handle on the qualitative performance of any of the individual reps. The customer service reps were explicitly measured and graded solely on the number of calls they took each day. The goal that was presumably in place to improve the customer experience was, in fact, making it worse. Rather than aligning results to the strategy, the goal was unintentionally misaligning the results to the strategy. Goals must be aligned to the strategy. We’ve seen dozens of situations in which people outline what they think their goals are and put huge effort into executing them only to find that they are not aligned to the organization’s strategy.
