Darwin Online - Read Darwin -Nice Guys Finish First - Customer Relationship Management Before Hunter arrived from Citibank nine years ago, QVC kept track of company-focused metrics: calls per hour, sales per minute, profitability per customer. Now QVC emphasizes customer-focused measures: How friendly are the call center reps? How knowledgeable are they about the products? How clear are invoices and product instructions? How many people does a customer have to speak with to get an answer? How often does a customer have to call a second time to get a problem resolved? QVC gathers these metrics by fielding customer satisfaction surveys (quantitative and qualitative, run by outside companies) and by tracking every last phone call. Cross-functional teams made up of call center staff and systems staff review customer service reports every week and figure out what areas need work. For example, when Hunter arrived at QVC, 15 percent of customer service callers had to ring back a second time to get their problems resolved. Since some of those calls were from customers who had returned items and wanted to make sure their accounts had been credited, QVC began crediting customers' accounts more quickly and sending cablegrams to let customers know. Thanks to changes like this, the number of callers who need to make repeat calls to customer service has shrunk to 3 percent, Hunter says; the goal is for it to reach zero.