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Fun anecdote time Lenny and even this new Jolly Roger AI- it's not just the telemarketers who are being scammed, some of them are using Lenny to do the scamming to get around their employers rules and get out of having to do real work.

At a previous startup I worked at, we had an outbound call center with 500 reps who were incentivized by their talk time- the amount of time they spent on outbound calls.

We found about 5 sneaky agents who would purposely call Lenny and sit on the call doing nothing, doing their nails, reading their kindle to keep their metrics up and high and look like they were doing their jobs well (and winning monthly contest incentives that would give them small bonuses or extra PTO) instead of calling real customers.

I always wondered if the people who designed Lenny know about how some reps purposely call them to keep their own metrics up. Like, they think they are sticking it to the telemarketer, but really the telemarketer WANTS to screw around and take forever on the call so their performance bonus increases.

Once we caught on to this, the company changed the metrics around to number of unique outbound calls. But then the reps also figured out a way to game that. There were even a few of them who figured out a way to set up dummy numbers and they would basically call their friends, or even EACH OTHER at the call center, and sit on the call with their friends instead of calling the call center. I could never really blame these reps, it was such a crappy soul sucking job and I gotta say behind the scenes I was always impressed with their ingenuity to try and get around the metrics. These reps were making $11 an hour and had to clock out even to use the bathroom (illegal practice that the company just broke the law on).

I'm so glad I left that place, it was such a toxic atmosphere.

4 comments

I suspect that the authors of Lenny would think that was the best possible outcome. Stop a telemarketer annoying people AND wasting the money their employers? Sounds like a pretty good outcome.

Wouldn't this be sticking it to the company though? Wasted unproductive phone calls hurt the bottom line and produce no sales, and as you mentioned the employees running this scam get bonuses, so costs go up.

What could be better to hurt the company than that?

In other words, the goal here is to disincentize spammy calls from businesses.

Causing telemarketing to be less profitable and more costly is a good way to achieve that, so this tool being used by "both sides" is a good thing.

Read a piece years ago that said you should be very careful what targets you set in business as people will inevitably optimise/game the system them for those targets.

I've seen this play out at multiple places with staff all the way up to are managment/director level.

Not just business, this is true everywhere. As Goodhart's Law puts it, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3978

Yay!! A somebody else referenced Goodhard's law so I don't have to.

The concept has an extremely long and storied history. Just look up the 'Chinese Imperial Exams' for more info. Makes me really wish that Eastern History was taught in Western schools. Otherwise, we're doomed to repeat their past mistakes.

This is integral to any system, not just business. The incentives you set will dictate how the system works. This can have great effects when used correctly and disastrous effects when people who have no idea how to create a properly functioning system are the ones making the rules.

One example is that in Mexico, people don't have to pay property taxes until a building is complete, so there are many buildings with a false unfinished second floor so they can always be marked as incomplete.

> One example is that in Mexico, people don't have to pay property taxes until a building is complete, so there are many buildings with a false unfinished second floor so they can always be marked as incomplete

It seems like courts would fix the problem here, since a judge could easily see the spirit of the law and fix the letter of the law accordingly.

So, the Cobra Effect (as Wikipedia calls it)? Original story being that the colonial government offered a bounty for each poisonous snake killed (intending to reduce their numbers), but ended up increasing them because people bred cobras for the income.

Seems like the same sort of thing is playing out in companies using telemarketing.

  > had to clock out even to use the bathroom (illegal practice that the company just broke the law on).

Assuming you're in the US, what's the relevant law?

I'm not sure about the relevant law, but here is a bunch of articles about it:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/company-pay-employe...

Interesting, this case was at a telemarketing company too. Wasn't my old firm, but this is EXACTLY the same thing that my old company did. Guess it's an industry wide practice!

> According to a DOL release, American Future Systems — which is based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, and has a number of locations, including in Woodbury Heights, according to the company website — allegedly made telemarketers clock in and out for breaks as short as two to three minutes. The company's timekeeping system would reportedly subtract the break time from the employees' total hours worked each week.

> The DOL said workers were docked pay for virtually all time spent not making sales calls, sometimes bringing their wages below the federal minimum wage.

> The judge ruled that the practice violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and determined that the company is liable to pay back wages.

> In a statement, the company said it never denied any employees a break, but instead worked with them to create a flexible work environment that gave reps personal freedom.

That last sentence, lol.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2016/01/company_made_worker...