Call Center Management Featured Article
Workforce Management Solutions Help Contact Centers Reward High Performers
Today, business news is awash with reminders of the importance of employee engagement. Workers, who are engaged with their jobs, with their own goals lined up with those of the organization, and a determination to achieve those goals, are incredibly valuable to any organization. Unfortunately, in today’s workforce, they are not very common.
Most experts would agree that employee recognition of a job well done is an important tool for forging employee engagement. Employees who work hard only to find their effort taken for granted will disengage, regardless of how high ranking or well-trained they are. It’s therefore an important step, particularly in the contact enter, to build an active employee recognition and incentive program that rewards hard work and sets goals for employees to achieve. But it’s also critical to track employees’ performance in a way that qualifies and quantifies it, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“If not, the good intentions of an incentive program can backfire, as deserving agents are unintentionally overlooked,” he wrote.
Managers relying on observation or anecdotal evidence might find they are skipping over deserving employees and rewarding employees who had an uncommon but visible success. This is often why charges of “favoritism” arise in contact centers. According to Ciarlo, this is an area in which a robust workforce management solution can help.
“A workforce management solution delivers the performance metrics that are most pivotal to a call center’s customer service effort,” he wrote. “Many of these are determined by agent performance. It’s a good idea to track them not only as they relate to agent incentives, but to overall performance efficiency and customer satisfaction.”
This way, you’re not only tracking performance, you’re keeping tracking of how it directly affects customer relationships, and therefore the company as a whole. According to Ciarlo, some of the more common metrics to track for the purpose of incentives and rewards include average handle time (though it’s important not to over-emphasize this one if first-call resolution is a goal), average talk time, average speed of answer (ASA), and after-call work, when agents take the time to finish the tasks required to wrap up the call.
“Performance metrics help to easily, quickly and fairly calculate performance for each agent to use as a basis for incentives,” wrote Ciarlo. “With this data, managers will always know that rewards are going to those most deserving.”
Edited by Stefania Viscusi