Posted by: James Burr
on Aug 12, 2010
This entry is the last of a series of entries on the topic of “What Performance Metrics are Right for my Business?” In previous posts I discussed the first and second tiers of the return on investment from performance management. In this post I’d like to introduce the 3rd tier: Contribute Back.
The final and hardest tier to accomplish is the ability for an organisation to exploit the huge wealth of information in the contact centre to drive product development, give visibility to impending marketing issues such as declining publicity, inform legal of emerging issues and provide insight into changing customer expectations. This requires high levels of expertise within the frontline to extract and capture this information in a way that it can be distributed and reported on by other departments. In addition it now becomes crucial that your workforce morale is high and that your employees are exhibiting proactive and positive behaviours. There are direct and proven correlations between employee morale and customer satisfaction and loyalty.
When measuring knowledge and expertise within your employees a good way is to break your knowledge and coaching into segments or “steps” in order that you can identify when an agent has completed a knowledge segment and is ready to move to a more demanding and complex learning goal. Measuring how many agents are able to transition between these segments can give you a clear idea as to where in the business your experts are. Some of the metrics for this tier would be:
1. What level of coaching are my agents attaining? Who are my experts?
Metric: Coaching Attainment Segmentation
2. What is my employee morale?
Metric: Employee Satisfaction
3. Are we capturing the right information at each interaction?
Metric: Data Quality
4. Where are your interactions most successful and most cost effective
Metric: Resolution Rate by Channel (Web, Contact Center, Face to Face)
5. Which interactions are most cost effective and successful?
Metric: Cost to Resolve by Channel
These are some of the "Holy Grail" metrics that enable a business to take full advantage of thier largest customer facing "surface areas" and enable customer satisfaction to be truly met while keeping costs under control.
I look forward to your feedback
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Author: James Burr
James Burr is the Business Consulting Manager with Merced Systems. He has over 7 years experience implementing Sales Performance Management systems in a broad range of industries including Telco, Finance and Automotive. He can be reached at james.burr@mercedsystems.com
Posted by: James Burr
on Jun 23, 2010
This entry is a continuation of my previous post: What Performance Metrics are Right for my Business? (Part Two of Four). In my previous post I discussed how the first tier of the return on investment from performance management is improved efficiency. In this post I’d like to introduce the 2nd tier: Focus on your Customers.
Now that you have the foundations in place and have started the process of enabling managers to become effective coaches you can start to introduce metrics that focus more on the customer interactions.
The metrics on this tier are more complex to capture and will often involve combining information from multiple departments and channels.
1. Can you resolve the Customer requirement on the first interaction?
Metric: FCR or Right First Time
2. How do the Customers rate your service?
Metric: Customer Satisfaction (Surveys, Complaints, Door to Door)
3. How much does it cost to resolve the customer requirement?
Metric: Cost per Call Resolution
The key to getting the most benefit in this tier is understanding the balance between the Cost Per Call and resolving the customers requirement. Moving to First Call Resolution should include an understanding of the current costs involved in resolving each customer interaction. Customer surveys should be in the context of the product and department being discussed and should be linked back to the original employee.
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Author: James Burr
James Burr is the Business Consulting Manager with Merced Systems. He has over 7 years experience implementing Sales Performance Management systems in a broad range of industries including Telco, Finance and Automotive. He can be reached at james.burr@mercedsystems.com
Posted by: James Burr
on Apr 01, 2010
Today I will build on my previous post: What Performance Metrics are Right for my Business? (Part One of Four).
We've seen that when looking at an organisation and the return on investment in Performance Management there are typically 3 tiers that a company will transition through. In this post I’d like to discuss the 1st tier: Improving Efficiency.
In the first tier the focus is on improving the efficiency of your employees by removing common barriers to their day to day activities and freeing up time to focus on your customers and receive the coaching they require to improve their own performance. Managers are the key to this improvement and understanding whether they are putting time into improving employee performance or instead are spending that time on reporting, data capture or dispute management. When choosing metrics and KPI's to measure performance in this tier it is imperative you give yourself a clear understanding of the following:
1. How much is every contact with the customer costing you? Metric: Cost Per Contact
2. How much time are your managers spending coaching? Metric: Coaching Time
3. How often do your managers coach your frontline staff? Metric: Coaching Cadence
4. Can you identify whether employees are using best practice in their calls?
Metric: Quality Management (Call Monitoring)
Getting the basic coaching principles right in this tier is crucial and your reporting should be geared towards measuring the correlation between coaching and performance, for example does AHT (employee metric) reduce when Coaching Cadence (manager metric) increases?
In my next post, I will discuss tier 2: Focusing on your customers.
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Author: James Burr
James Burr is the Business Consulting Manager with Merced Systems. He has over 7 years experience implementing Sales Performance Management systems in a broad range of industries including Telco, Finance and Automotive. He can be reached at james.burr@mercedsystems.com
Posted by: James Burr
on Mar 11, 2010
When looking at Performance Management, a question that gets asked a lot is "What metrics should my company be using to measure performance". The answer given is often a convoluted one involving many caveats, "ifs" and "buts". In this entry, I want to present a different take on how to tell if a metric is meaningful to your organisation and some suggestions for getting the most out of the metrics you already have. This will be part one of a four part series.
The first question to look at is "What is Performance Management" and perhaps the best way to answer this is to look at the answers to two other questions: "What do you expect of your employees?" and "What do your customers expect of you?” The cornerstone of Performance Management lies in exceeding your customers’ expectations during every interaction that they have with your company. Your contact centres and frontline employees are at the heart of this strategy. Performance Management can be defined as: the process of ensuring all levels of your organisation have accurate and timely visibility into the metrics that define your strategy and have the tools available to improve their performance. It's clear that for your company to be successful and meet the two goals of exceeding customer expectations and improving the performance of your employees, your metrics have to reflect where you are as a company. There is no point diving straight to complex KPI's if you haven't laid the foundation stones in your performance management strategy.
When looking at an organisation and the return on investment in Performance Management there are typically 3 tiers that a company will transition through, gaining further benefits at each tier. The tiers are:
1. Improving Efficiency
2. Focusing on your Customers
3. Contributing back to the organization
The key is to figure out how your company ranks against this structure. In the next couple of weeks, I will delve into each one of these tiers and discuss how to choose metrics and KPIs to measure performance in each tier.
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Author: James Burr
James Burr is the Business Consulting Manager with Merced Systems. He has over 7 years experience implementing Sales Performance Management systems in a broad range of industries including Telco, Finance and Automotive. He can be reached at james.burr@mercedsystems.com
