Performance Management: Unlocking the Secret to Executive Enlightenment
1 May, 2007
By: Dani GolanIn business, growth and success go hand-in-hand. Whether it’s attracting new customers or finding ways to sell more to existing ones, executives are focused on growth objectives. Executives with a broader understanding of the contact center’s role in the enterprise know – as the critical link between customers and the company – the customer service organization plays an important role in achieving the company’s growth objectives.
Performance management offers a powerful framework for connecting the dots between contact center goals and enterprise objectives. By leveraging business intelligence, workforce management, quality and analytics among other critical systems, it provides a unified view of performance across the organization. Measuring and managing the contact center using common goals, key performance indicators (KPIs), data sources and balanced scorecards ensures everyone clearly understands the factors driving business results.
Performance Reporting
Of course, adopting a performance management culture doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to transform the contact center into a strategic part of the business. As with any major business transformation, careful planning and evaluation must occur first. Typically, this process starts with performance reporting. The task of getting performance information in a timely manner, in a format that is understandable and actionable can be a huge leap for many.
From Measurement to Motivation
It’s one thing to measure performance. It’s another to motivate employees. Performance management puts the information employees need to do their job better, right at their fingertips. It directly impacts their behavior and it also enables them to take greater control of their own performance. When contact centers use performance management:
• Agents work smarter with a clear understanding of expectations and their actual performance.
• Supervisors manage better, knowing which agents need help and in what areas. They can also see who is performing well, and objectively recognize those employees for their achievements.
• Analysts, managers and executives can easily track overall performance across a broad spectrum of metrics, even in complex, hierarchical environments. They can quickly drill-down into the root cause of problems, conduct what-if analysis and develop action plans to address the underlying issues.
• Workforce planners benefit from access to historical forecasting trends and scheduling results. This enables them to understand in detail where discrepancies may have arisen, diagnose trends and adjust future plans.
Set Realistic Goals
In order to motivate employees and achieve realistic results, performance goals must be reasonable. By ensuring set goals are realistic, the contact center can increase acceptance of its performance management initiative – which in turn creates a positive work environment that promotes a culture of accountability.
Optimizing People and Processes
Once the performance management initiative gains acceptance, it becomes a mechanism for optimizing people and processes, where real business gains are delivered. Performance management provides a comprehensive view of goals versus actual results. Without performance management, seeing real results typically requires manually pulling information from multiple reports derived from numerous systems, many of which present conflicting results. Performance management software streamlines the reporting processes by consolidating information, normalizing results and presenting it in a way that is both meaningful and accurate.
Conduct Root-Cause Analysis
Since performance management makes obtaining actionable information much easier, it can help the company start tackling more complex business questions. The center can use performance management to look at cross-tabulated financial, customer service, sales, marketing and employee productivity information to create an accurate picture of how people and processes interact.
Performance management enables you to go beyond simply seeing ‘what’ is happening in the business to discover ‘why’ it is occurring. Comprehensive analytical processing and reporting capabilities make conducting root-cause and what-if analysis much easier. That way, contact center managers have the confidence to know the decisions they’re making are well aligned with enterprise-level goals.
Focus on Continuous Improvement
Implementing performance management requires time, patience and continuous refinement in order to realize the full benefits. The organization must set aside adequate time for process review, employee feedback and open discussion on how it is impacting the business. With proper and realistic planning, the organization can create a sense of ownership and better facilitate the adoption of the program. When the entire organization embraces performance management, the contact center can become a strategic part of the business – helping executives achieve growth objectives.
