If you could do one thing to improve the performance of your call center, what would it be? No doubt, several things just came to mind and you would probably have a hard time narrowing it down to just one.
Perhaps, you do come to one conclusion, such as turnover. But even turnover isn’t a factor in itself. It’s affected by many different issues throughout your center such as hiring, training, coaching, workload, scheduling, and career pathing.
Unfortunately, most managers don’t have the luxury of time to manually interpret all these different pieces of data. That’s where performance management comes in.
Performance management requires you to look and analyze a myriad of statistics. You probably already do this to some extent. Your ACD spits out call handling stats, your workforce management systems give you insight into schedule adherence, your sales databases keep track of successful up-sell and cross-sell activities, and your quality assurance system gives you information about how well agents’ scored on evaluations.
But what distinguishes performance management software from other tools such as analytics, is the ability to not only collect and analyze statistics but to interpret how they actually drive performance in your call center and throughout your organization.
For most call centers, performance management is both a business strategy and a product category. In our July issue, we highlighted a few companies that have put a performance management philosophy into place. In this article, we look at some of the latest standalone tools available from the vendors that can help you develop and manage a performance optimization strategy.
What’s the Point?
While there are many software products available for tracking metrics, as we mentioned earlier, the distinguishing facet of performance management software is the ability to link data back to real business outcomes.
“Performance management is the systemic use of data to define and clarify goals, measure performance, increase productivity, and improve results,” says Mark Selcow, president and co-founder of Merced Systems (Redwood City, CA). He describes it as a “management technique built on data.”
Merced offers Merced Performance Suite 2.5. This latest version, which the company announced in spring, features several new enhancements. For example, the Staff Manager tool compiles an agent’s entire performance history and displays the information along with coaching and development tools on a single screen. You can view a complete record of the agent’s quantitative and qualitative information along with information from past team assignments.
Merced Performance suite also features three new pre-configured workflows. These best practice workflows include coaching, which ensures agents receive the focused development necessary; recognition, which automates the recognition of top performers; and voice of the customer, which collects and compiles valuable information on customer ideas and feedback.
Robert Mattson, director of product marketing for Performix Technologies (Burlington MA), says that bringing information together from disparate systems is just the first step.
Performix offers Emvolve Performance Manager, which uses an open database model and a standard set of configurable performance scorecards that are targeted to supply pertinent information based upon individual users and their role within the organization.
“Performance management doesn’t come in to play until an organization starts to act upon the deficiencies discovered by ‘performance reporting’,” says Mattson. “True performance management requires that a solution enable improvement through training, mentoring, coaching or some other developmental process.”
Metrics That Matter
Gathering data is the easy part. The hard part is deciding exactly what kind of metrics you should be focusing on. And if you don’t know what you’re looking for, too much information can quickly become overwhelming.
Most experts recommend taking the time to outline what your performance goals are.
“The key to turning statistics into useful information is to define the goals first and then build the business transformations that turn raw data into valuable information,” says Mattson. “Many organizations make the mistake of looking at the data that is supplied by their existing systems and then trying to derive information from this jumble of numbers.”
Most call centers struggle to find the balance between quality and costs. But this is where performance management solutions provide value. The software enables you to track a combination or index of metrics that you have already shown to reflect your company’s goals, either in accordance with your company’s principles or based on evidence involving customers.
“The ultimate goal of performance management is to enable companies to maximize their customer and consumer-facing interaction,” says Tony Hayward, CEO of AIM Technology (San Francisco, CA). “To be financially competitive but also build loyalty, companies must be able to determine the best tradeoff between cost efficiency and customer satisfaction. Otherwise, how does management know how to invest, and deal with their customers, while extracting the most from their sales and service dollar?”
AIM Technology’s AIMCall is a performance management tool that helps managers, executives and agents identify areas for performance improvement. The software lets you measure and correlate traditional efficiency metrics such as average handle time with business-level measures such as service level and up-sell and cross-sell information.
Most vendors offer some set of services to help you determine what your goals are and figure out which metrics will best measure your goals. For example, Witness Systems (Roswell, GA) offers a performance management audit to customers of its eQuality Analysis. During the audit, Witness works with you to understand what kind of metrics you currently measure and help you identify your future goals.
“We work with our clients to define a set of KPIs that we think would best align with the set of objectives that they have in the call center and then align that to various different levels of an organization — from agents to supervisors, managers and directors,” says Ky Tang, senior manager with Witness Systems.
Opus Group (Chicago, IL) offers a unique blend of services and technology with its Opus Suite.
The company begins by observing and conducting a thorough analysis of your call center’s current business processes to help customize a performance management strategy that will work best for your company. In addition to integrating data from different databases and systems across your enterprise to provide dashboards of information to agents, supervisors and executives, Opus Suite enables you to measure individual performance against goals and provides an empirical basis for agent coaching and feedback.
Witness’ Tang believes that performance management software offers context to statistics and measurements that might otherwise be meaningless.
“Only information that’s provided in the right context can be related back to individuals,” he says. “For example, if I told you that I was driving in my car at 50 miles per hour, could you tell me whether I was driving too fast or too slow? Not without the proper context — If I was driving in a school zone, it was obviously too fast but if I was on the expressway, I was driving to slow.”
Moving Beyond Efficiency
Call centers are beginning to realize that they need to select more than just indicators of basic efficiency, like average handle time.
As Joe Fleischer explained in his coverage of CUNA Mutual and The Hartford Group in the July issue, to demonstrate dedication to customers, companies have to select performance indicators that incorporate customers’ perspectives. They also need to ensure they have the resources to answer a sufficient quantity of calls without sacrificing quality. And they need to achieve a sufficient level or quality when communicating with customers without sacrificing efficiency, so that they don’t risk keeping customers on hold for long periods of time.
“Companies are often measuring what they can versus what they should,” says Mattson. “By driving measurement from the business goal level instead of the agent activity level, most of the confusion over metrics can be avoided.”
One example of this is first-call resolution (FCR); an important metric that is gaining more recognition. As Keith Dawson explained in his April 2005 Editor’s Page, compared to traditional telecom metrics, FCR offers a place to start looking at the end point of the process and isolating how well the ultimate goals are met: happy customers and repeat business.
However, FCR is not the easiest metric to manage and how you calculate it depends much upon the type of industry your call center serves. For example, a customer who calls a help desk for assistance with installing software on a PC is more likely to have his issue resolved within one phone call than the customer of a bank who wants to refinance his mortgage.
“First-call resolution requires a balance between absorbing a potential increase in cost from reduction in productivity (i.e., AHT, increased training costs, etc.) against an increase in revenue from higher levels of customer satisfaction, customer retention, sales or related measures,” says Merced’s Selcow.
Michael Callaghan, chief executive officer of Opus Group, believes another metric call center’s should be paying more attention to is pend rate. Similar to FCR, pend rate gives you insight into why calls couldn’t be solved initially.
"Pend rate is a great metric because it really links the overall resolution of the customer’s issue to a single metric — not just to what they do on the phone but potentially what happens after the phone call,” he says. “Such as why couldn’t they resolve it over the phone and to what degree does one agent’s skill level or experience level impact their pend rate.”
Once you have selected the appropriate metrics, performance management tools typically use “dashboards” or “score cards” to display information. These tools generally contain historical and real-time reports that display stats in a graphical format.
By delivering personalized and relevant information to the appropriate people, performance management can help managers identify problem areas. For example, trainers can use performance management data to pinpoint coaching or mentoring deficiencies.
Most tools deliver performance management statistics directly to agents’ desktops as well. For example, Envision’s (Seattle, WA) Envision Performance Suite offers a browser-based interface that gives agents information on their work schedules, quality monitoring scores and evaluations, training videos, and more.
People and Processes
Even if you do take the time to choose the best possible metrics, a performance management strategy is still susceptible to failure without the proper follow-through. The real goal of performance management software is to provide you with the tools for change. How you ultimately implement that change is completely up to you.
“Performance Management is a constantly evolving process,” says Opus Group’s Callaghan. “Managers need to understand that there’s no beginning and no end. You have to continually work on making improvements.”
Merced’s Selcow recommends that managers make an effort to do the following:
- Empower every employee with accurate and relevant data to make better data-driven decisions,
- Drive accountability so that everyone knows what they are responsible for and how they are performing against their goals,
- Create a culture of continuous improvement where management is committed and open to examining and re-engineering all processes (e.g., hiring, training, quality and coaching), and
- Experiment because performance management is an evolutionary process where metrics evolve and change over time to reflect evolving business priorities and strategies.
“It’s important to remember that performance management software is a focus tool,” says Witness’ Tang. “It enables you to focus on specific areas, agents and problems and then drive those problem areas into improvement.”
