Management is trying to work out the “incentive” structure for my program. Sales are not actually “sales” because “we,” an insurance company, are simply trying to move existing “customers,” medical facilities, from receiving payments from patient claims via paper checks to direct deposit into their bank accounts. Responses range from, “Doctor likes seeing and feeling checks,” to, “Thank God! I wish all of my payers would do that.” Heavy on the latter; I called one woman just when she had a stack of fifty checks from us in front of her that she had to post manually.
Sales (S) can be broken roughly into two groups: S[sub]1[/sub] is my primary goal, where I walk the person through the basic registration process. Very simple, takes four minutes without monkey wrenches, two if they type quickly and don’t need hand holding. S[sub]2[/sub] is actually three subsets, but they all sum up to me sending an email or fax with a link, with hopes that they follow up. Management doesn’t want us concentrating only on the S[sub]1[/sub] sales and ignoring the lesser ones. I disagree, seeing an S[sub]2[/sub] as both a success for the program and the default for when I fail to make an S[sub]1[/sub], both being positives, just not all that positive. But I’m a big-picture guy, and they are trying to make something that works for the S[sub]1[/sub]=GOOD, S[sub]2[/sub]=BAD crowd you would encourage if there were only a commission on an S[sub]1[/sub]. The result is a system where our weekly pay is our base plus an additional amount hourly (ranging from $0 to $3.00), based on our sales-per-hour (S/T) AND the ratio between S[sub]1[/sub] sales and total sales (S[sub]1[/sub]/S). To reach the top rate we need S/T=3.75 or better AND S[sub]1[/sub]/S=40%. For instance:
T = 38.75 (our scheduled weekly hours)
S = S[sub]1[/sub] + S[sub]2[/sub] = 150
S[sub]1[/sub] = 60
which gives:
S/T = 3.87 (greater than 3.75)
S[sub]1[/sub]/S = 40%
We are not allowed pens or paper for security reasons, and we can only track our own performance through that moment on that day, using a computer app that can be notional. At first management would show us all a paper showing everybody’s performance to date, but that lasted three days. Now we have to gripe to get the numbers from the previous week, and without that the only way we usually know how well we did is by our paychecks. This is unsatisfactory.
One will also note that T * $3 = $116.25, while if I got a lousy $2 commission on each S[sub]1[/sub] and zip on each S[sub]2[/sub] my commission would total $120, without need for tracking anything else, as S[sub]2[/sub]'s are nearly automatic–outright refusals for me average around five paper fetishists* a day.
And what if I spend my week walking people through the S[sub]1[/sub] process, which can take twenty minutes? My S[sub]1[/sub] rate goes up while S/T goes down because I am devoting less time to overall sales; I’ve watched the snapshot change when my S[sub]1[/sub] rate approaches 50%, where I’m being more successful but my sales-per-hour drops below the threshold of me making maximum money. This doesn’t seem fair, somehow, and I’d like to make a chart showing the sweet area where S/T is 3.75 or greater and S[sub]1[/sub] is 40% or greater, but I’m out of head meds and wasn’t much good with math, singular or plural, ever, so it’s taken me two hours to suss out this much. 
I’ll get back to it later when I’m better medicated and get out of my head the suspicion that the chart will need to be 3D and I have a proper spreadsheet (you can’t do shit with Excel Starter 2010).
Mostly, my complaint is that the system is too complex and disincentivises the preferred type of success (maximum S[sub]1[/sub]) to create an artificial incentive for a secondary target (S[sub]2[/sub]) in order to raise sales per hour because that’s the overall metric by which everybody here is judged, whether they are doing what I do or selling magazines.
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- Yes, I know their reasons make sense, for them, and that’s why we aren’t forcing them to go electronic, yet. But it is where things are going and other payers are already more insistent. Sometime in the next couple years they won’t be able to get checks from any insurance companies and will have to go cash-only. Some already have, but with the ACA they are going to be limiting their patients to illegal immigrants soon. I think some do, already.