Optimising your performance management

Selecting suitable customer service strategy and monitoring its effectiveness is crucial in order to provide a satisfactory customer experience.

Performance management is a continuous process of initiating effective customer service activities. To do this right, you need to be clear about your expectations and put the right system in place that will help you to measure, generate performance reports and take necessary action.

Critical considerations for performance optimisation:

–    Having a clear and thoughtful definition of key performance indicators (KPIs)

–    Close supervision and data monitoring to measure key performance indicators

Performance management processes should be based on detailed and trackable operational data. It should also have clearly outlined roles and responsibilities associated with monitoring and reporting this data.

The data can be used to encourage agents to exceed their goals and continuously improve the process.

There are two critical stages of the performance management process:

• Defining expectations
•  Performance measurement

1. Defining expectations

The management needs to be clear about their expectations. This can be presented in a form of distinctly defined operational data with specific goals allocated to it.

Operational data should supply information about the employee’s performance and customer’s experience, help to identify the cause of problems and improvement opportunities. When setting performance targets, align incentives with your business goals to positively encourage employees to contribute to your business growth.

The KPIs you choose, should be clearly defined and communicated to all customer service representatives. Each such indicator should be assigned to appropriate roles in the organisation, with each role having a clear set of KPIs for which it is responsible and by which it is assessed.

Examples of KPIs at the role level:

• Agents: performance, quality, CSAT

• Team leaders: performance, quality, CSAT, TAT, TRT, AHT

• Quality specialists: quality deviation or quality calibration

• Instructors: Error rate in quality data and DSAT product or process-related, where Root Cause Analysis identified training as the cause of the error

• Operations Managers: All defined KPIs, including Continuous Improvement and Innovation

2. Performance measurement

An effective governance system should be put in place to ensure that performance indicators are monitored and used to make decisions based on available resources. Indicators should be analysed, and conclusions should be used in planning and implementing activities.

OPX is a system that can automatically measure, analyse, and report on all individual KPIs. It offers significant support in planning activities, forecasting demand and assigning the work to the right people with consideration of current and future availability.

With the right system in place, we recommend holding meetings for managers to periodically review specific performance indicators based on clearly defined criteria in the appropriate business context. In each of these reviews, the right participants should be included in order to draw correct conclusions from the data and take appropriate action.