Trade Secrets: Getting the best from your Performance Management solution

Here are 10 top tips for getting the best out of your Performance Management solution.

1. Don’t run your operation on averages

Understanding the statistical variance in your contact centre metrics may reveal that some employees perform much better – or worse – than others.

Understand what the root cause is and put an improvement plan in place for each employee.

2. Ensure that you manage schedule adherence

Stefan Captijn

Many operations spend a lot of time and resources making sure that the forecast is accurate and the schedule is in place but do not have a good handle on schedule adherence.

You could easily be losing valuable capacity on employees not doing what they are supposed to be doing. Managing schedule adherence can make a difference.

With thanks to Stefan Captijn, Senior Director Product Marketing at Genesys

3. Use quality-scoring templates to identify areas for improvement

Use quality-scoring templates to identify and target specific areas that agents need to work on to improve their performance.

Also keep an eye on real-time dashboards to stay on top of basic performance issues like too much time in ‘wrap’. Then relay to your agents that by spending too long on after-call work they effectively slow the pace of the campaign and their colleagues down.

4. Align agent goals to the business

Understand what the right KPIs are for your business and follow these through to agent level, aligning agent goals with those of the business.

For example, take cost per sale from agent level and aggregate that up to organisational level. Or take agent’s salary plus the data costs and compare against the revenue generated.

With thanks to Derek Morrison, Success Manager at Magnetic North

5. Hold supervisors accountable for being great coaches

Contact centre managers should be watching whether employees flourish under Supervisor X or Supervisor Y.

They should track changes in employee performance following coaching sessions. And they should monitor ‘movement’ – whether a supervisor’s team is moving towards leading performance or lagging performance across time.

When contact centre managers use Performance Management in these ways, they can identify top supervisors, capture their best practices and help their peers get better at their most important job – coaching.

With thanks to Scott Buchanan at NICE Systems

6. Make sure your experts share their knowledge

Make sure your supervisors, team leaders, training and development specialists, quality assessors and the WFM team all share knowledge.

Alec Bowman

To achieve this, try setting up role sharing or having monthly process reviews. For example, have your QA explain to a Forecaster how assessments happen and why agents need to have learning time scheduled.

You should also get your experts to train less experienced users – to create more experts!

With thanks to Alec Bowman, WFO Consultant at IP Integration

7. Widen the definition of Performance Management

We recommend a wider industry definition of Performance Management. Not only should it cover call quality / compliance monitoring, but also employee engagement, productivity and, last but not least, the impact on customer behaviour.

These all drive each other (and ultimately, the bottom line) and need to be measured in parallel to ensure that management understand the contact centre’s effectiveness as well as its efficiency. There are inherent dangers in examining these areas in isolation.

8. Introduce advisor-level customer satisfaction surveys

Contact centres should introduce advisor-level customer satisfaction surveys. This is because receiving feedback from actual customers is taken on board to a much greater extent than from a QA colleague scoring calls.

We see increases of 20-30% in customer satisfaction or NPS with companies who previously only did QA monitoring but now break down customer feedback to an advisor level.

9. Mix your metrics for a more holistic look at performance

Mats Rennstam

More and more companies are now building holistic scorecards for their advisors – not only looking at productivity and QA scores but also factoring in customer satisfaction scores and basing incentives on the overall performance.

Mixing these metrics should give you significantly better insight into the real true performers. For example, mixing AHT with the customer’s score of advisor competence might shed a brand new light on who spends half the time (and thus money) and yet still drives CSAT.

With thanks to Mats Rennstam, Managing Director at Bright UK