Can Performance Management Applications Really Impact a Contact Center?
1 Sep, 2007
By: Mike SmithemanWhat do most people think of when they hear the words “performance management solution”? It immediately gets associated with data, spreadsheets, reporting, scorecards… a better way of getting information about your operation. This is all true of performance management solutions, but no business has ever improved from just generating reports. It is the businesses processes (coaching, training, reward and recognition to name a few) that an operation puts in place to act on that information and the way in which they track the effectiveness of those processes that really drive performance improvement across the organization. The real value in performance management solutions is the ability to use real-time data and information to drive applications that support these types of processes.
Motivate, Measure and Manage
Contact center performance management solutions encompass three key focus areas for employees: the ability to motivate, measure and manage. Employee motivation occurs through reward and recognition and providing the tools and information to attain goals. Maximum manager effectiveness is achieved by providing the tools and information to frequently review, coach and assess their employees.
Closed Loop of Performance Management
Many know the challenges of effectively reviewing employees in a contact center environment. Frequency, follow-up and paperwork are three unpleasant aspects of this task that make evaluating employees a mundane task as opposed to an effective performance-improvement technique.
Assigning coaching based on performance is usually impossible due to the lack of current information about an employee. Training plans and schedules, therefore, tend to be assigned globally and focused at the beginning of an employee’s tenure with the organization. Effectiveness of certain types of training and coaching is impossible to track.
Rewarding employees is a labor-intensive task and requires lots of number crunching at month’s end. So much so, that reward schemes become inflexible and lack motivation for the employees and in some cases disappear altogether.
Reality is that due to the repetitive nature of contact center work, the ability to do frequent reviews, assign targeted coaching plans and motivate employees with creative and flexible reward schemes are all crucial techniques in improving organizational performance and reducing attrition. The key is having the technology and data automation to support this. This is where performance management solutions come in.
Review
Where does the data come from to accurately measure and review performance, and why is it preferable to have these data feeds automated rather than a hand-tallied version? In a contact center, there are many systems generating a great deal of relevant performance data at different frequencies. Customer data, such as revenue or first call resolution, details on the length of each call, customer satisfaction scores and employee quality are all being captured and recorded somewhere. A manual, labor-intensive effort to compile this data into meaningful information usually results in inaccurate and outdated spreadsheets or reports.
Managers need a timely, accurate version of each employee’s performance record to set both quantifiable and subjective goals for the coming period for their team and to begin improving the performance of each employee.
A performance management solution will automate data feeds from multiple systems. There will be Web-based access to individual scorecards, real-time and historical reports, analytical reports that benchmark and stack rank employees, and the tools to set and maintain individual targets and goals.
Coach
Setting goals is worthwhile only if managers have the information and tools to effectively coach their employees to achieve individual targets. Traditionally, it has been very difficult to understand the effectiveness of the coaching, training and one-to-one sessions that occur in the period between setting employee goals and measuring their attainment. There may be a number of ad-hoc sessions between managers and employees as well as many different types of training available or there may be very little interaction and follow-up once goals have been set.
To leverage what works well within the operation, coaching and one-to-one interactions need to be tracked and reported throughout the period. Based on this information, managers need to follow-up regularly and adjust goals as necessary.
A performance management solution will link into training material and courses available within your operation. Comparing an employee’s current performance review results with expectations or targets, the software will automatically prompt managers with recommended training suggestions considering courses the employee has taken in the past.
The solution will provide managers and employees a way of capturing interactions and recording when individuals have completed assigned training.
Assess
Assessment of employee performance is usually addressed long after the fact. This is due to the effort required to collate the data to understand what has happened.
Ideally, assessing employee performance should be a continual cycle throughout the review period so a manager can be proactive in adjusting coaching plans as employees work to attain their goals.
A performance management solution will allow this continual assessment. Quantifiable data will automatically feed into an employee’s objective goals. Managers will be able to continually record updates on subjective areas. Detailed, out-of-the-box reports will show the “before and after” performance of any coaching an employee completes.
Consolidated management reports will highlight what training is effective or where it has had an effect (e.g., improved customer satisfaction or increased efficiency).
Reward
Managing reward schemes that are effective within the operation are equally if not more labor intensive than the collecting of the data to support them. Typically, month or quarter end sees a huge exercise that feeds results and numbers into spreadsheet models. From there, managers must manually address exceptions. After this time-consuming task, a series of results that can be converted into rewards or recognition for employees is finally pushed out.
The effort involved in doing this and the accuracy with which it is done usually detracts from the appeal of the reward scheme and goes against the reason for it in the first place…as a motivational tool for your employees and to reduce employee attrition. Employees contest the results, the accuracy of data is put into doubt and conflict as opposed to performance improvement is achieved!
Performance management solutions provide a flexible and simple way of using the data that is being collected alongside subjective reviews that managers are carrying out, to automatically generate awards for a multitude of schemes you may want to run. Having the ability to continually change and update them as the organizational goals change keeps employees interested and motivated to achieve their goals.
Solutions allow employee recommendations or manager commendations as exceptions to the rule, to recognize outstanding performance.
It is with accurate, timely data and the active participation of managers and employees that the Performance Review cycle (Review, Coach, Assess, Reward and Review) is most effective. A performance management solution can facilitate and automate the processes of measuring, motivating and managing, streamlining operations, saving organizations time and, of course, helping improve overall employee performance.
