This is the title of a new book on customer service by Bill Price and David Jaffe. I read a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal.  

One of the main ideas in the book is that customer service organizations tend to measure the wrong thing. They measure how fast the phone is answered, response time, or average call handling time. This results in the wrong behavior, the example given is that if you set a goal of 12 minute average call time, reps will say whatever it takes to get the caller off the phone before the 12-minute mark.

The authors suggest that instead, you should do what Amazon.com does and focus on contacts per order or contacts per unit shipped. Now the motivation is to get the organization focused on improving the customer experience so that a call to customer support is not required in the first place. One recommendation is to charge the cost of customer support back to the product team that created the need for the call.

Remote service is a great way to improve your customer contacts per product by proactively solving problems before they become support problems. Selecting the right metrics to measure for remote service is a key success factor. If your support reps are only measured on calls taken, they will ignore the proactive alerts generated by your remote service system.