Driving Strategic Business Outcomes with Agent Performance Management
There are hundreds of metrics a contact center can focus on, but how do you determine which are the most important? Well, before deciding on that, you need to identify – as an organization – what you’re looking to improve; what’s impacting the strategic direction of your company?Say it’s decided that customer satisfaction is the key focus. While every facet of the company will play an important role in the end customer’s satisfaction, each function or employee will have different responsibilities. Let’s break this down even further – specifically to the agents within the call center. How are you going to make sure they perform effectively?
Automated performance management solutions can draw on data from different sources across the contact center to provide a unified view of performance, while aligning the results with goals and other targeted business outcomes. These tools allow executives to set the strategic agenda using key performance indicators (KPIs), which they can align with the business strategy. For example, if the goal is to improve customer satisfaction, it might be advisable to have front line agents focus on customer empathy scores, following the script, and customer survey scores. If agents meet these operational goals, the organization will accomplish its customer satisfaction objectives. Agents can also view personalized feedback that helps them track performance, and when needed, participate in automatically triggered coaching. The contact center is able to evaluate and improve individual agent performance, while guiding employees to work together to achieve broader objectives.
Here are some best practices for managing and maximizing your agents’ performance:
• Ensure that agents fully understand goals prior to the performance period. This ensures they focus on these metrics and are more likely to accomplish them.
• When choosing KPIs, make sure the KPIs drive the behavior you want to see. Choose KPIs that front-line agents and supervisors will understand and that are in support of your strategy.
• Set up your performance management system to automatically alert you when agent performance falls below target, which frees supervisors from having to sift through reports.
• When conducting performance reviews and coaching sessions, be sure the sessions are fully documented, so staff can go back and see the problem and plan for the resolution.
While many organizations realize the importance of optimizing performance of their contact center agents to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and manage the extended workforce, fewer organizations employ performance management to align resources to strategy and improve the effectiveness of agent performance. In fact, a 2009 report from Ventana Research indicates that agent performance management is still an untapped strategic tool in many companies.
Performance management tools ensure that everyone is working towards the same strategic goals. A comprehensive application provides complete visibility and accountability at every level of the organization, while diagnosing and correcting problem areas. Businesses that embrace performance management as both a process and tool are more likely to consistently achieve their strategic goals.
What is your organization doing to assess and improve agent performance? What best practices have you implemented?
Author: Brett Williams
Catergories: Performance Optimization, WFM
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