The Watermelon Effect: Every Metric Green, Every Customer Angry

In The Journey to Service Excellence, John Sansbury tells a story that captures it perfectly. His brother and sister-in-law sat in a queue for over an hour for a cross-Channel ferry that was visibly docked and due to sail in fifteen minutes. No announcements. No explanation. Drivers left their cars to find out what was happening. The cause turned out to be a simple surge of passengers transferring from a rival ferry company that had a problem of its own. A single announcement would have kept everyone calm. Nobody made it. Consumers dislike delays, but they hate not being kept informed far more.

The watermelon grows from measuring the wrong things, and measuring them in the wrong way. Three habits are worth breaking this quarter.

First, stop reporting availability as a percentage. Ninety-nine per cent availability sounds impressive. For a service running ten hours a day, five days a week, it means the service is down for an average of about eight minutes a week. That is the number your customers experience, so that is the number that belongs in your reporting.

Second, fix your satisfaction survey. A 1 to 5 scale invites a lazy mid-point, and averaging the scores produces a narrow band that barely moves from one survey to the next. Work the book cites with the University of Surrey showed the averaging method to be invalid. Use a forced 1 to 4 scale, ask for a reason behind any low score, and report the percentage of responses at each score rather than a single average.

Third, audit your reports. Sansbury describes a contact centre whose monthly performance report was thicker than two textbooks stacked together. The Finance Director who received it admitted she did nothing with it beyond taking comfort that the manager knew what he was doing. Analysis showed he did not. If you suspect a report is read by nobody, stop producing it for a month and see who notices. In the author's experience, nobody ever has.

The cure for a watermelon is not a better dashboard. It is measuring what the customer actually experiences, and having the honesty to act on it.