This one happend at the same place as [[Improving KPIs with an Outside Line]] - an ID call centre with pressure from head office and managers to improve two figures from the phone system: reduce 'average call duration' and increase 'number of calls taken'. One Monday Morning, the supervisors had had an idea, and gathered us all around for an announcement. Over the next two weeks, whoever took the most calls would win two bottles of wine! They proudly showed off the fizzy 'wine', which was actually labelled 'partially fermented grape must', and was very cheap - probably less than £3 a bottle at the time. So the offer seemed to be that we would work extra hard for a fortnight, and in return, we'd get two of the cheapest bottles of not-quite-wine the supermarkets could sell. It wasn't compelling. The reaction generally contained more shrugging than they seemed to have expected. So everyone pretty much forgot about it for the week. Monday of the next week, they announced that the current leader was me. Not out of any effort to win, but it did show nobody else had been making any particular effort either. But one colleague had been on holiday for the last week. "What's this? Two bottles of wine? I want that" he said. "Well, you can't. It's only on for two weeks and you've missed half of the time." "I don't care, I'm going to win." "You can't win, you'd have to take twice as many calls as anyone else." "Yeah. I know. I'm gonna win." So for the next week, every time his phone beeped with a call, he hit the button to answer, then the button to hang up. For an entire week, every customer who got through to him was immediately hung up on. Hundreds of calls were just dropped. At the end of the week, he was declared the winner, and given his prize quite happily by the supervisors. I thought they'd be unhappy about how he'd done it, to say the least, because they *had* to know. They knew. They just didn't care. Their job was to reduce average call duration and increase the number of calls. His call durations helped bring the average down, and people who'd been instantly hung up on probably called back, so there were more calls. Hundreds of annoyed customers were just irrelevant - nobody was being judged on that, so nobody cared. If you run your business on KPIs, people will find ways to change the numbers, and it might not be what you want.