Tony Hayward discusses how successful performance management can ensure staff motivation and retention is more inventive, thereby resulting in greater employee confidence and job satisfaction.
Take a couple of minutes to think about your last interaction with a contact centre. Can you remember it, for reasons good or bad? Some of you will, but probably in many cases the memory is pretty vague. Is that the reaction that companies want? It most definitely is not.
Next think about what makes such an interaction memorable. My view is, it has to be down to people. If a contact centre phoned to tell you that you had just won £1 million but the person on the phone was downright miserable, you probably wouldn't believe them. Likewise if you phoned up in a stinking mood to complain but were treated like a king, your original problem may fade into insignificance.
Unfortunately we don't always 'get' the true importance of people management in customer services. Apart from a small selection of companies, we seem to fail to treat the public we are supposed to be serving as fellow human beings.
Surely the critical success factor for any service-centric organisation is customer happiness? At the end of the day, customers are people too.
Money can be poured into marketing strategies and customer relationship management, but if one person on the phone, answering web queries or in the branch, does not have a clear understanding of how their performance affects the organisation's overall goals and of course their own objectives, all of this investment can be wasted.
You only have to consider the money spent by the many utilities service providers, each one trying to poach customers from another. The level of service experienced by many customers when they actually make the switch from one to the other is notoriously bad.
Invest in improving people performance
It's almost a case of, "now we've got you, we know we're not going to keep you for long, so what's the point?" The phrase 'you get what you pay for' springs to mind. For these companies, investing in improving people performance (and possibly sorting out their internal processes too) means they would not have to keep churning customers at a high cost to the business at quite the same rate.
So what's the problem? Many organisations now operate against clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs). In other words, they are the factors demonstrating whether the organisation is performing against its stated goals. They can be varied and complex, relating to people, processes, customers and finance. But vitally, they need to be measured; people also need to be measured against the KPIs of their job within the organisation.
Measuring KPIs at an individual person level allows each of your employees to have a clear line of vision on how his or her day-to-day tasks have really made a difference. What a powerful message that is to give to your workforce; but how often do we do it?
One problem with doing so is the massive amount of data coming in from all directions. This is raw data, not information. Data needs structuring, merging, crunching, modelling, comparing and analysing in order to provide useful information.
To do this, you need a performance management system that is focused on people metrics, and can deliver information in real time, but has the power to perform multi-dimensional analysis. For example, comparing customer call lengths against employee skill sets and sales generated from calls to provide a composite view of information. This is required if you see the importance of the correlation between people performance and the bottom line.
Analyse HR trends
Once you have such a system, you can really start to analyse people's performance and make changes to improve it. Two clear areas to this exist; the first is at the operational level, managing the performance of individuals or teams of individuals by drilling down into the data and using it to communicate and improve performance. The second is at a strategic level, analysing HR trends across the entire company – absenteeism for example – to uncover cause and effect, and change policies that will lead to broader improvements.
At the operational level, probably the simplest illustration of success is going back to those KPIs. If you could show each individual employee how he or she was performing against targets, fellow workers and overall company goals, with up-to-the-minute accuracy, a huge motivational boost could be realised.
Add to that the ability to link personal performance to key people processes like performance reviews, coaching, training, and reward and recognition, and you add even more reasons for employees to want to perform.
A call centre agent who knows that they are just two points away from a bonus 20 minutes before the end of their shift is much more likely to be productive for the rest of it than one who does not know this information. You can also make the objectives set in appraisals clear, hard and measurable.
At the strategic level, you are dealing with the improvement of HR policies and practices through meaningful information. An organisation might find that absenteeism is higher among a proportion of its agents but the cause may not be obvious.
Analysing absenteeism and sickness data against other operational data may uncover that this proportion of the workforce are all based in a section with poor ergonomic support provided which, it is discovered, is causing back pain. A new policy would solve these problems.
By now you should have thought about your last interaction with a customer services team and whether the person on the end of the phone, in the branch or sending you messages stood out or made a difference? If they did, performance management may well have played a part.
Tony Hayward is CEO of AIM Technology
