Posted by: Matt Glickman
on Sep 29, 2009
We just completed our 5th product summit, and it's exciting to see the growing momentum for performance management across industries and functions. While the concept of performance management seems universally applicable across industries and functions, the executives who attended our summit- each of whom work for companies that are leaders in their industry - can attest that there is still much to learn, and learn from each other they did. It's always interesting and energizing to see people share ideas but what struck me most at this year's conference, was the degree of sharing and collaboration that went on between two functions within the same company - sales and service. Colleagues realized that they shared the same problems and that one's ideas, plans and solutions absolutely applied to and affected the other.
Several years ago when we began serving both sales and service functions, many existing players in the industry said that the groups were too distinct. They had different needs, different cultures, and different approaches. But we saw an insightful trend emerging - executives who were good at aligning and driving performance improvement across complex sales groups were increasingly getting tapped to run service functions and vice versa. The sharing of ideas and practices across functions at our customer executive summit is a natural expression of this trend. Companies are discovering that at the end of the day, it's all about learning what customers want, ensuring the right employees are set up to take care of the right customers, and managing to hit or exceed targets. Merced customers are living proof that the innovative ideas - both managerial and technical - can make a huge difference in any environment that touches customers. If you run a sales group, are you reaching out to your support counterparts? If you run a call center, are you talking to your sales managers? If not, you should.
Posted by: Matt Glickman
on Sep 01, 2009
In an economic downturn, it's easy for organizations to feel like they are stuck on a reactionary path. Executives are issuing mandates to their senior leaders to sharpen their pencils and make the organization leaner. When the bad times come, companies have no choice but to turn their attention to improving efficiency. But the process of making your organization more productive is much more than a Band-Aid application but a complex challenge with long term benefits. The good news is that it pays off and does so quite quickly - for companies and for our economy.
Last week, the US government announced that labor productivity went up 6.5% from April to July, not only above forecast, but also the largest increase since 2003. Labor costs per unit of output, not coincidentally, dropped 5.8%, the largest decrease since 2001. In plain terms, companies are getting more efficient because the hard economic times are forcing them to focus on doing the same or more with less.
Our performance management projects almost always revolve around this theme - whether it's about taking costs out of a service environment, driving sales uplift, or increasing customer satisfaction: how can you get more out of your existing resources. We built our initial business in 2002 and 2003 helping companies drive quick and dramatic improvements in their operations. We are seeing a similar wave of growth in this downturn. It's interesting that in good times, companies often let up a bit on the drive to become more productive and effective. But regardless of what spurs the initial conversation, organizations soon realize that the focus on performance management is always relevant.
One of my goals at Merced is to facilitate an ongoing discussion with customers about how they can best use performance management in their organization, in good economic times and in bad. The upcoming Merced Systems Executive Summit is designed to facilitate exactly this type of discussion among a global group of customers. We have created a forum for sales and service performance management leaders to share success stories and challenges and learn from each other. This year, the goal is to use each other's insights to address immediate needs as well as lay the foundation for new avenues of growth as good times return.
So act, don't react - and you might just see benefits to your organization long after the recession has come and gone.
I will share more stories from this year's summit in future posts.
Posted by: Richard Snow
on Dec 10, 2008
The priority to utilize your employees effectively in the interactions with customers and prospects is no simple task. The need to respond customer requests efficiently with your agents in the call center and leverage inbound customer interactions ‘calls’ for providing information to sell additional products and services is critical for business. Just as important is managing outbound interactions to promote and sell for reaching specific targets from revenue to specific goals and objectives. Now if it was as easy as that, everyone would have their sales and services operating efficiently to specific performance targets, but now with specific applications, it can be simpler. I have for years advocated sales performance management but this is just one of many areas that need to be addressed and integrated with services and your call center operations.
I recently had a chance to further examine the company and product capabilities of Merced Systems who has brought together the agent performance requirements for call centers and through the acquisition of UK-based Practique, provides incentive management that can help influence the behavior of your sales and services organizations. This acquisition and product now called Merced Incentive Management compliments existing products for agent performance management, Merced Performance Suite. Not sure what to expect, and knowing that sales and services have unique and common requirements, I got a chance to examine the modeling, analytics and rules that perform key calculation along with generating the goals and plans required for small to very large sales and services organizations. The varying roles of individuals from managers, to operations analyst and sales operations to the management are all addressed in the role based applications. They provide the key aspects of optimizing and aligning your people to the customer and operational goals of your organization.
The incentive management application is complimented by the recent release of Merced Performance Suite 3.5 that brings critical advancements to coaching from workflows to establishing goals to help maximize the full potential of agents. This new version also simplifies managing agents to first contact resolution (FCR) metrics and helps examines performance to find the cost and effectiveness requirements of the contact center. If you are not tracking the market, the importance of FCR is critical to meet specific customer satisfaction needs and customer experience processes. As well Merced now supports a dozen languages to support deployments globally which is pretty much standard these days with medium and global sized businesses.
I have seen how many organizations have transformed to very efficient contact centers that use their agents for specific sales and services needs. Just as important is also managing the distributed retail or mobile field sales and services agents to performance targets and reach the ultimate operational performance management agenda. Unifying the performance management needs for sales and services is the new and expanding mission at Merced Systems. As these applications become more known through customer success in deployment I am expecting to see this segment become of the top application segments in 2009 where customer performance is a top agenda item. The power of understanding, optimizing and aligning your sales and services agent’s performance from contact centers to field locations is where many organizations are finding a competitive advantage. Let alone most businesses are looking to operate leaner which is no easy task in a tough economy is a top priority providing rise to what I have been discussing as agent performance management that can operate across your line of business areas such as sales, service and call centers.
I expect that Merced who we have covered in research for many years runs a very efficient and customer focused software business will have a good opportunity to advance this agent focused sales and services performance management need that maximizes your people and customer assets.
Let me know your thoughts.
