Magnifying Glass on Performance Enhancement
1 Mar, 2009
By: Mark SelcowQuestion:
My organization is being asked to cut costs while also increasing customer satisfaction. What are the most efficient and effective ways to ensure that my frontline employees are focused on delivering positive business results? Can you recommend a few ideas for driving optimized performance in my contact center?
---Performance Challenged in Pennsylvania
Answer:
Dear Performance Challenged,
In today’s uncertain economy, constrained resources and pressure from Wall Street are forcing many organizations to be short-sighted in developing performance plans for their employees. Now is the time to go back to the basics in your organization – to ensure that each and every employee adds value to the company. Across-the-board, employee performance improvement is critical for organizations to survive this economic slowdown, so here are a few creative ideas to help elevate performance in your organization.
1. Take a targeted approach to coaching: Are your supervisors spending a significant amount of time coaching low-performing agents? If they are, I’m sure you’re becoming frustrated with the small measured gains in team and center performance improvement. To get the biggest bang for your buck, coaches should be focusing their time and effort on the comparatively large portion of performers “in the middle” – or those whose performance is average. This group likely understands what is expected of them and what they need to improve, but simply needs some targeted guidance on how to improve. By giving supervisors the visibility they need to identify specific agents for improvement plans, as well as the tools to make coaching more efficient and effective, mid-performers can quickly progress into top-performing status and boost operational performance.
2. Create a best-practice knowledgebase: Literally, create a knowledgebase of the practices and strategies of your organization’s top performers. This enables your mid- or poor performers to learn from the masters by fostering communication and an environment of sharing. Develop a set of “Blocking and Tackling” tools – a list of common issues or objections raised in customer service calls, and recommendations or rebuttals scripting how to turn those interactions around. Publish examples of well-handled calls, so that all reps have access to samples they can learn from and emulate. Empowering your frontline with both knowledge and improvement tools is critical in helping your organization to boost performance across the board.
3. Institutionalize performance management: If you’ve been paying attention to the news in the last couple of months, you may know that one of President Obama’s first orders of business as President has been to establish a Chief Performance Officer to hold both government offices and government-run agencies accountable for their financial and performance success. Does your organization have a group of key business stakeholders or a steering committee that manages operational performance? Is this group made up of representatives from all levels of the organization - from agent to executive? One of the first steps to ensuring that your organization is improving performance is to institutionalize performance management within your operation. And a steering committee made up of members from all levels of the operation can develop and implement practical solutions to meet strategic goals. When a person or a group of people are suddenly responsible for an organization’s performance, priorities quickly shift.
4. Establish individual goals, and reward based on attainment: Rewarding individuals for good performance has been shown to be more effective than punishing bad behavior. To meet your organization’s objectives, tie individual goals directly to key business drivers, reward employees when targets are met and pay for performance. For instance, if your service organization is now also responsible for generating sales, attach incentives – including cash and non-monetary – to rep behavior that drives cross-sell or up-sell. Finally, highlight stellar performers in your organization publically, along with their incentive payouts. Instilling a healthy sense of competition among an operation’s frontline will help to ingrain business priorities. For example, post a list of the top 30 performers in a prominent place in the contact center to create a culture of positive competition, motivate mid- and top-performers, and promote best practice sharing. It turns out that channeling behavior with incentives is actually an economic way to meet business objectives, ensuring that your frontline is individually focused on meeting organizational goals.
