Empowerment: A Recipe for Success - One Part Trust, One Part Technology
1 Nov, 2004
By: Brian SpraetzIt is no secret that happy, motivated contact center agents provide better customer service. Satisfied agents are also less likely to go looking for other employment opportunities, resulting in lower turnover.
Creating and maintaining a positive working environment in the contact center can be a never-ending challenge. Given its critical importance, however, it is a challenge all contact centers must address.
Empowerment is commonly suggested as a way to motivate the contact center workforce and improve their performance. Many times, though, empowerment becomes more of a catch phrase than a true instrument for change. To really understand what empowerment is and how it can help, let us first look at what it is not.
True Empowerment
Empowerment is not just delegating responsibility. It is quite the opposite because responsibility for the center’s performance rightly resides with management. As the manager of a contact center, you may empower your agents to take breaks when they need them, but you are still ultimately responsible for meeting your center’s service level goals. Rather than simply pushing responsibility down the reporting chain, real empowerment shares responsibility throughout the organization.
Many companies also confuse empowerment and involvement. Involving agents in the decision-making process without giving them some control over the eventual outcome is simply using them as information sources. Turning involvement into empowerment requires the delegation of authority, a proposition often unsettling to management. Delegating authority, however, does not have to mean a loss of control.
True empowerment is based on trust…trust by management that empowered employees will make good decisions without a need for direct oversight. True empowerment requires that responsibility and authority be jointly distributed within an organization. For this to be successful in the contact center, employees must have the knowledge and skills to make informed decisions along with the desire and opportunity to act. It also requires individual goals to be aligned with overall enterprise-level objectives.
Empowerment Technologies
Technology is a valuable ally in fostering an environment of empowerment within the contact center. There are four technologies commonly cited as “workforce optimization” solutions: workforce management, performance management, quality monitoring and e-learning. These technologies play a dual role as “workforce empowerment” tools by helping collect, organize and disseminate what is often an overwhelming amount of data available in the contact center. Getting accurate, useful information to the people entrusted with the authority to act is a key requirement for successful empowerment.
By providing a mechanism for determining, aligning and managing the strategic goals of the contact center, these technologies serve as a compass to success. They guide the operational results of the center, both in the short and long term. These tools also identify areas that need improvement and assist in implementing corrective actions.
Self-service technologies give agents direct control over their working environment, while maintaining the constraints of overall business needs. This not only promotes strong feelings of empowerment in the workforce, but also returns significant cost savings to the organization through automation efficiencies.
Ultimately, empowerment technologies build management’s confidence in the ability of agents and supervisors to make sound decisions and take appropriate actions. This fosters the critical distribution of responsibility and authority down the reporting chain needed to enable true empowerment.
Workforce Management
Workforce management tools improve the forecasting, planning and daily management activities of the center. They also provide an array of agent self-service and task automation features.
Workforce management systems often provide the first step in information collection and dissemination within the contact center. Access to key performance statistics from ACDs and other contact routing systems, combined with schedule adherence and accuracy information, provide workforce planners with the information they need to make empowered decisions. Supervisory-level access to this same information creates empowerment by enhancing the supervisors’ ability to manage their team’s performance and assume greater responsibility for their results.
Through the automation of many tedious and time-consuming processes in the contact center, workforce management systems free up significant amounts of supervisory and management time. Rather than being consumed doing “busy-work”, managers can use their newfound time on activities that foster empowerment such as coaching, team building and performance improvement initiatives.
Self-service features of workforce management systems promote agent empowerment by giving agents a higher level of control over their working environment. Letting agents conduct their own schedule trades and manage changes to their schedules conveys feelings of responsibility and accountability for their actions. Rules-based processes working in the background ensure the needs of the organization are maintained while giving agents the freedom to act independently.
Performance Management
Performance management tools provide a framework for aligning and managing goals across the job functions through scorecards, key performance indicators and workflow controls, combined with advanced analytical and reporting features. Through the clear communication of goals and results, both individual and overall, employees at all levels of the organization understand what is expected of them, where they currently stand and are enabled to take corrective actions when necessary.
Through the establishment and tracking of key performance indicators for the center, performance management systems provide an enhanced view of execution and success-determining factors. This improved understanding provides a sound foundation of information and awareness upon which to base strategic decision and problem assessment activities.
Quality Monitoring & E-learning
Finally, quality monitoring and e-learning systems work hand-in-hand to monitor, identify and resolve skill or training deficiencies within the contact center workforce. Ensuring agents are adequately trained to respond to customer requests promotes a less-stressful, positive working environment.
Quality monitoring systems foster management confidence in the agent workforce, helping establish the sense of trust and accountability necessary to enable the distribution of authority down the reporting chain. Although commonly viewed as agent training tools, e-learning technology can also facilitate training for supervisors and mid-level managers to enhance their decision-making abilities.
Delegation and Technology Empower Success
The operational benefits of empowerment within the contact center are powerful. Enabling true empowerment requires a distribution of both responsibility and authority down the reporting chain. To successfully create and maintain an environment of empowerment, organizations must ensure that employees trusted with making decisions are equipped with adequate knowledge and skills, and that they are encouraged and allowed to act. Lastly, the proper application of workforce management, performance management, quality monitoring and e-learning technologies facilitates the appropriate degree of information availability and operational control across multiple job levels, in addition to their operational improvement and cost-saving benefits.
Evaluating the Benefits of WFM Self-Service Features
According to Penny Reynolds of the Call Center School, a self-service feature that enables individual access is one of the latest features of workforce management systems. This new capability has been touted as everything from a practical way to support the communications process in scheduling to the ultimate solution for improving staff retention.
Let’s face it: If this new feature could really improve staff retention (even by a few percentage points), no call center could afford to be without it. So just what are the ways that tools such as these might factor into the retention picture?
First, frontline supervisors never have enough time to do all they need to do. Automating some of the administrative tasks associated with schedule changes, vacation requests, and so on can add precious minutes to a supervisor’s day. If these “found” minutes per day can be devoted to one-on-one coaching and development time, the call center will most definitely see performance improve. And the more one-on-one time, the better the supervisor/employee relationship, which can only serve to strengthen job satisfaction and retention. The key to recognizing this benefit is to have supervisors actively track time saved and commit to spending it side-by-side with their staff.
Supervisors can also benefit from this new reporting sidekick. Sometimes gaps in performance can simply be due to lack of feedback about individual performance. If agents can have access to their own performance statistics, including handle time, available percentage, adherence, and so on, they can better judge how to make changes in their behaviors to meet performance expectations. Again, the key to recognizing the payback from this feature is for supervisors to actively track improvements in behavior and then recognize and reward them on the spot.
This new capability is a big plus from the agent side, too. Schedule changes and vacation requests can be processed automatically, meaning quicker feedback for personal planning purposes. Agents may also be able to trade schedules with other agents using virtual trading boards, providing a greater sense of control and empowerment. With agents having such little control over their scheduling fate in general, some sense of being at the controls can contribute significantly to morale and satisfaction with the overall scheduling process.
When contemplating the purchase of any new tool or add-on feature, you’ll want to do a hard dollar analysis of the payback potential. But don’t forget the potential that may await in the softer dollar benefits that may be found in these new self-service features.
