If you manage an operation that processes individual requests, cases or such that typically take a day or more to complete, you probably track a lot of metrics. Things like average completion time, percent completed within a goal time, etc. are typical parts of an operational dashboard. Those are useful in assessing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your process.

One thing that those can mask however is any outliers, like a case that has fallen through the cracks and is not being worked at all. Your overall process can be humming along quite well but an outlier can really create a bad customer experience for somebody. Customers like this are the ones most likely to post complaints about you on the internet, to the press, to regulators and others. While 99.9 percent of your customers have a great experience, this 0.1 percent can create a big headache and embarrassment for you.

So how do you minimize the risk of having a customer fall through the cracks?

A great metric to include in your dashboard is “Age of Oldest Case” (AOC). This basically identifies the oldest case in your system and calculates how long it has been in there. Once that case is resolved, you find the next oldest case. By tracking this AOC metric, you will keep focus on resolving those individual problem cases and not just ignore them.

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