The Performance Management series

A key strategy to motivate and retain contact centre professionals is to provide constructive feedback that demonstrates the individual’s progress against pre-defined objectives. Coupled with this, the individual needs to be informed how his or her own individual contributions affect enterprise wide performance. This feedback or coaching should fill the gaps in knowledge and skills and give the individual a feeling of making a difference in a tangible way. However, many enterprises fail to achieve these benefits because of the administrative burdens such processes can create. Technology solutions are available that help to automate these processes.

It is imperative, however, that time saved through automation should be used to maximise time spent accessing and improving individual performance. Foxglove Consults unique series of Performance Management Workshops provide a proven approach to formulating, measuring and communicating improvement processes that we motivate retain and heighten the performance of staff working in the contact centre environment. The Performance Management Series Workshops can be broken down into any number of modules and specialized to increase performance with any contact centres.

Productivity Management (1 Day):

Your Managers and Team Leaders will learn how to, build a fair definition of agent and centre productivity goals that considers:

• Build a fair definition of agent and centre productivity goals for all primary role work carried out.
• Effectively create and use agent and centre productivity graphs.
• Create work state usage guidelines to ensure proper use of agreed work practices.
• Implement agent sign-on agreements.
• Implementing a process for production and display of productivity performance charts.
• This will be achieved by examining and agreeing on:
• Number of calls handled,
• Number of mails handled,
• Number of webchat sessions,
• Average time not ready,
• Average work time per piece of work,
• Average wait time.

Quality Management (1 Day):

Your Managers and Team Leaders will learn how to:

• Demonstrate the synergies between productivity and quality.
• Demonstrate the synergies between productivity and quality.
• Design a quality measurement process that measures the quality call handling between agents and customers for all communication channels being used.
• Design a definition of a Quality Call / Mail / Chat session.
• Develop a weighting system for calculating agent quality.
• Develop a productivity and quality matrix.
• Design a calibration process to ensure consistency in quality results.

Agent Job Mastery (1/2 Day):

Your Managers and Team Leaders will learn how to:

• Create a systematic inventory of agent skills required to ensure individual success and the knowledge needed to measure each agent’s abilities.
• Design and implement an agent knowledge and skill self-assessment form.
• Design and implement an agent personal development plan.
• Install a world class coaching process that turns team leaders into mentors for the agents.
• Implement the roles and responsibilities of supervisors/team leaders in creating and maintaining a high performance work culture.
• Share productivity and quality data with the right message.
• Optimise one-on-one coaching sessions.

Spirit and Recognition (2 Hours):

Your Managers and Team Leaders will learn how to:

• Install a process to review, modify and improve the contact centre’s operations through incentives, recognition and rewards.
• Design a fair and equitable “spirit and recognition” program using a behavioral management approach.
• Communicate positive ideas and beliefs to motivate your team to higher performance.
• Differentiate motivational factors.
• Use agent productivity/quality data to energise motivation and incentive programs.

Time Management for Team Leaders (2 - 4 Hours):

Your Managers and Team Leaders will learn how to:

• Identify the causes of time management problems in contact centres.
• Design a step-by-step time management process that addresses the administrative and coaching aspect of the Team Leader’s position.
• Employ powerful contact centre time management principles and techniques.

Service Level Management; Managing Customer Wait Time (1/2 Day):

Your Managers and Team Leaders will learn how to:

• Measure service level and determine what metric is the most advantageous to the contact centre.
• Manage service level and effectively use historical call volume data.
• Graphically portray and understand the dynamics of wait, average speed of answer, abandon rate and service level metrics.
• Set the ‘right’ contact centre service level goals for the centre.
• Calculate service level, average speed of answer, and abandon rate.
• Design a system for call load forecasting, staffing and scheduling.
• Optimise existing agent schedules.
• Determine the ‘right’ number of agents for on line and off line activities.
• Manage ASA in real time.
• Design an alert system to deal with above normal fluctuations in call volume.
• Calculate the customer impatience factor and its’ affects to your call centre.
• Implement a process for the production and display of service level charts.

Cost of Call Management (2 - 4 Hours):

Your Managers and Team Leaders will learn how to:

• Optimise your contact centre resources for maximum cost effectiveness.
• Determine which costs should be included in your cost per call.
• Learn how to include costs that are proportional to the number of agents.
• Calculate loaded labour rates, automation/technical costs and telecom costs.
• Determine cost per rep hour and cost per call.
• Build an economic case to get the right number of agents to meet service level objectives based on ASA/cost per call dynamics.
• Understand the cost of poor ASA.
• Customise a cost analysis spreadsheet with your own contact centre figures.
• Develop a plan for contact centre “cost of call” improvement.
• Learn what to measure, how to measure it and the best visual representation for those measures and sharing the data with others.

Inhibitor / Barrier Workshop (1 Day):

Effective communication leading to clear understanding is essential to establishing and maintaining a high performance work culture. Through this very interactive and challenging workshop your Managers and Team Leaders will learn to coach to the “emotional hurdles” frequently faced when implementing a Performance Management process. Specific “hurdles” coached to will include:

• “productivity and quality charts will create distrust”
• “the numbers are not accurate”
• “charts will embarrass people”
• “charts will hurt teamwork and promote negative competition”
• “why do we require names on charts”
• “this is not our program, rather one that was selected for us. Why did you choose this type of performance management and why were we not part of the decision”
• “sharing our personal results has singled me out as a high performer and resulted in my peers treating me unfairly, what can you do to make me feel less uncomfortable around my peers”
• “how can you put a score on quality when quality can’t be measured”
• -“why aren’t supervisor’s measurements as visible as the rep’s measurements”

In addition, your Managers and Team Leaders will identify and work through other barriers or inhibitors that they expect to encounter so that they can address them in a confident and knowledgeable manner.