Agent Productivity
1 Mar, 2006
By: Mark SelcowPart I: Supervisors: The Critical Link
There is an oft-repeated line in contact centers: “Agents don’t leave companies; they leave supervisors.” As the first line of coaching and quality, the primary channel for influencing agent behavior, and the backstop for angry customers, executives know contact center supervisors are critical to the business.
Yet so much is unknown about supervisor performance. For example, who is good at developing agents versus just fortunate in inheriting a talented team? Which supervisors are effective time managers and where are they spending their time? Even basic questions such as who is coaching at an effective frequency and who isn’t can go unanswered.
In order to increase supervisor effectiveness, leading contact centers understand it is important to tackle many of the common problems in the supervisor role including:
- Lack of managerial experience
- Excessive time spent on administrative tasks versus coaching
- Inconsistent managerial processes across teams and centers
- Inexperience using data in decision making, or a reliance on intuition
One tested method for addressing supervisor role issues is performance management, and the oneshould be designed to help supervisors interpret and apply data, track agent performance, save administrative time, increase coaching focus and efficiency as well as help develop agents directly to augment supervisor activities.
In addition the best performance management software systems should be able to deliver performance statistics across the entire organizational hierarchy. This allows an agent to track their own performance, giving the supervisor the ability to reinforce messages rather than being the sole provider of feedback. Then coaching sessions are transformed into true development discussions by shifting the conversation from statistics to skills transfer.
The bottom line: performance management helps supervisors manage by delivering insight, by making coaching sessions more impactful and by automating administrative tasks, freeing up substantial time for coaching.
Making Performance Management Work
To achieve the greatest impact, performance management should be viewed as organizationwide, rather than just for agents. Software screens should differ by role as metrics, goals and the ability to interpret data differ depending on one’s level within the organization. Historical tracking of team assignments needs to be accurate for the performance system to have value and impact. This ensures that everyone in the organization sees accurate data that is relevant to them, changing the conversation from “Is the data accurate?” to “What does the data mean?”
An effective performance management initiative should include supervisor-specific elements, such as:
- Clear, consistent, and objective goals personalized for every business unit, site or shift
- Timely delivery of performance statistics
- Historically accurate roll-up of data so time-based comparisons are correct
Therefore, the supporting technology in a performance management initiative must include:
- Automated delivery of timely and accurate data to agents and supervisors
- Delivery of focused metrics to facilitate targeted coaching
- Automated managerial processes (i.e., coaching sessions, recognition)
- Intuitive ad-hoc reporting tools to perform “root cause” analysis
- Comparisons across teams, centers and organizations to drive best practice sharing
Without these capabilities, supervisors are often faced with incomplete and inaccurate data forcing them to manage by self-assembled spreadsheets—or worse, intuition. Additionally, poor access to data often leads supervisors to focus their coaching time on bottom and top performers, ignoring one of the greatest opportunities—mid-level performers.
Automate Processes
The goal of performance management is to improve performance and processes throughout the operation—not just an agent’s activities on the phone. With advanced performance management applications, operations can and should standardize key management activities to improve the consistency and effect of critical processes.
By automatically nominating top performers for recognition and streamlining the evaluation process, contact centers are using performance management technology to help supervisors perform daily activities. This ensures each supervisor conforms to a company’s best practices. Most importantly though, automating processes with performance management applications help supervisors consistently reinforce core values and behaviors with agents, guiding agent behavior both on and off the phone.
Performance management initiatives should also extend metrics beyond phone statistics. Measures and balanced scores must go beyond the obvious and include new metrics and information that has a major impact on performance including:
- Supervisor effectiveness indexes—comparative values reflecting a supervisor’s coaching impact—resulting in more accountable, better supervisors
- Agent feedback forms: providing frontline employees a voice to identify improvement opportunities
- Coaching frequency tracking to eliminate intuition and guesswork in agent development, resulting in more focused and consistent agent development by each supervisor
Performance management is complex and supervisors are often an overlooked link. By removing administrative tasks and automating managerial processes across the center, a performance management platform can help an organization achieve its operational objectives. Providing supervisors with the tools to manage more efficiently and objectively can significantly increase agent satisfaction, and most importantly, effectiveness.
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Part II: Integrated Communications Improves Productivity and Revenues
Even the most intrepid manager doesn’t have time to personally monitor phone, e-mail and Internet usage. But communications resources are one of the costliest business expenditures, and recent information suggests you can – and should – have a precise idea of how much your company is spending and why.
Research released this summer from America Online and Salary.com reported that employees waste about two hours every work day, not including lunch, conducting personal activity on the company dime. Personal Internet use was the number one time wasting activity, cited by nearly half of the survey’s respondents. Making personal phone calls was another top response.
But tracking employee productivity isn’t just about being ‘Big Brother’. A significant advantage to having an integrated communications management system is the ability to improve business functions like customer service and budgeting and in many cases actually increase revenue. By examining all employee communications resources, including office telephones, cell phones, e-mail and Internet, these solutions put vital business intelligence reports at managers’ fingertips, any time and anywhere the company server is accessible.
For office and mobile telephones, integrated communications management solutions can report information such as how many outgoing calls an employee makes, what phone numbers are dialed, and how long each call lasts. Report functions can be used to spot trends and are especially helpful for improving both customer service and marketing efforts. For instance, the software can easily track the identity and geography of a sales department’s incoming callers, making it simple to identify the response to a particular advertising campaign.
For employees with Internet access, the software can identify how long is spent online, which Web sites are visited and highlight sites that are not work-related. Essential information is also available about e-mail habits that can be used to monitor both productivity and business trends by tracking where outgoing e-mails are sent, how often messages are sent and whether the e-mails are for work or personal use.
Customer service can easily be monitored and improved by tracking help desk employees’ average response time to e-mail inquiries, for example.
An integrated communications management solution should, above all, make it easy to positively affect your company’s bottom line. A common example is the difference in telephone bills once employees are aware that their usage is being monitored – often a 15-20% cost reduction. With many different software options available there are plenty of options, but what matters most is selecting a solution that identifies data pertinent to your business activities and analyzes it in an easy-to-use, resourceful manner for all levels of management.
