Preparing Agents for Customers' Increasing Demands
1 Nov, 2008
By: Mark SelcowIn today’s tough economic context, my organization is struggling to more effectively align the behavior of our frontline with our overall operational goals. We want to implement an incentive plan to more efficiently and impactfully drive performance, so can you provide some tips and guidelines to implementing an effective incentive program?
Stressing Over Incentives in Indiana
Dear Stressing,
Incentives are a great way to align employee performance with corporate goals, but unfortunately, many organizations struggle to find the right balance between pay and performance. Imagine trying to ensure the success of a complicated open heart surgery by a novice surgeon using only monetary incentives. Do you think that promising her $10,000 for a successful operation will enable her to actually perform the procedure? It’s highly doubtful. Without the proper training and coaching, the likelihood of her succeeding is extremely low.
While it may sound somewhat simplistic to compare a complex medical operation to service or sales, the fundamentals are the same. In each case, you are looking to improve the performance of an individual conducting a task. However, simply throwing money at the frontline won’t ensure success if an organization doesn’t have the proper tools in place to help employees succeed. Just as a surgeon never stops studying and practicing new techniques, a frontline representative’s path to success is to never stop refining and improving upon his or her methods through targeted coaching and training.
Here are a few tips to ensure your incentive program’s success, and your customers’ satisfaction:
1. Communicate the point of your incentive - Taking the time to introduce an incentive program with clear individual goals, standards for measurement, rules for payment or qualification, and purpose will lead to more impactful results, and will help connect company goals with the desired agent behavior. It''s important for both the frontline and business executives to be on the same page.
2. Pick the right metric calculation for positive customer and company impact –In service functions, for instance, there is a particular focus on Average Handle Time (AHT). Driving an incentive plan based solely on this metric can have the unintended and undesirable consequence – perhaps even agents interrupting customers, excessively transferring calls, or worse – hanging up on customers. The key here is to balance AHT or other productivity metrics with Quality or Customer Satisfaction, so agents are motivated to perform well on both standards.
3. Design your incentive program for maximum individual impact - Posting numbers and performance metrics on the wall that no one on the team can understand, let alone calculate, can lead to more questions about numbers and less focus on improving behavior. The connection between an agent''s behavior and the numbers tracked in the incentive program should be clear and delivered to every agent in a timely manner. For example, for blended sales and service calls, particularly those that take time to fulfill, consider delivering the "sales activity" metric (i.e., offers, accepts) rather than just revenue paid to the company, so that agents can track their daily progress toward driving sales and continue to improve.
4. Train your supervisors to praise and counsel on the incentives - If adequately prepared, your frontline management can quickly reinforce, or correct, agent behavior in response to new incentive programs. Give supervisors the tools they need to evaluate behavior and progress against the metrics used in the incentive program. Make sure they have clear standards for measurement, and take immediate action on any agent found ‘gaming'' the incentive inappropriately. It is important to remember that public praise for agents achieving success, and swift corrective action for those breaking the rules will also help drive the positive impact of the program.
5. "Test and learn" - With the introduction of any new incentive measurement program and supporting metrics, managers and executives will quickly uncover challenges in delivering results. For instance, problems with desktop resources, IVR call routing, metrics calculation, and rules for payout may surface when employees are hoping to maximize their results or take-home pay. So, plan for a ‘trial'' period to measure the new program and document the operating results to maximize the potential benefit of the program once fully implemented.
In sum, today’s leading sales and service organizations must adopt the solutions and tools that enable them to drive performance and overcome competitive obstacles. With so much riding on the behavior of frontline employees, a successful incentive program requires examination of each of these principles so that customer, company, and employees prosper.
