3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

If there’s one particular day a year that the average employee dreads most, it’s the annual performance review. This is the day every worker knows you sit down with the boss and he or she placates you with a little positive language and then proceeds to spend the rest of the time telling you about all the mistakes you made in the last 12 months. Since the review happens only once a year, some of your mistakes are being aired so far after they supposedly occurred that you can barely remember doing what the boss says you did. Sound familiar?

In the forefront of employee management thinking, the wisdom is starting to turn against the annual employee performance review. It’s an open secret that these reviews exist only for the company’s benefit: if an employee isn’t working out, the organization has feedback to can that person. If the employee’s performance hasn’t been perfect (and whose is?), the company can use that as an excuse to offer the smallest raise possible. You don’t see the coaches of winning teams talking to their players once a year.

If the goal of the performance review is to actually improve the quality of the workforce, there are far better ways to do it, wrote Jacob Shriar of employee engagement solutions provider Officevibe in a recent article for Business2Community. One of the methods involves greater frequency of reviews.

“The better way to give feedback is to do it more often,” writes Shriar. “Someone who isn’t performing well needs to know about it in real time, and someone who is doing great deserves immediate recognition.”

Until recently, the idea of providing feedback to performance in real-time or near real-time was laughable. Who has real-time stats for employees? In the contact center in particular, performance statistics are available only at the end of the week or the month.

While this has traditionally been true, technology today has given contact centers and other business functions more flexibility to keep an eye on real-time performance statistics. Analytics solutions tied to call recording and screen capture are one of the ways companies can reinforce positive behavior and correct less-than-stellar performance almost on the spot.

Another method is third-party call monitoring, Some organizations, such as BPA Quality, offer remote call monitoring that provides accurate and actionable feedback to agents and supervisors in real-time or near real-time.  The service provider samples recorded or live calls and measures the customer interaction based on standards they develop or the client company develops.  These observations are then turned into actionable scoring and feedback for agents and their supervisors that can quickly be turned into guidance for improving performance on customer-agent interactions.

The benefit is that the feedback is immediate, so agents can take realistic steps to improve performance right away. The tactic leads to improvements not only in employee performance and engagement, but measurable improvements in customer satisfaction. If your organization’s goal is to truly help employees (and not punish them), then it’s time to shift the focus from annual reviews to regular and real-time feedback.