Call Center Management Featured Article
Correlation Seen for Robust Performance Management, Employee Engagement
There is a strong correlation between robust employee performance management and high employee engagement. When employees are reviewed regularly, there are fewer surprises, and managers have more time to help workers actually improve the way they do their jobs, meeting personal as well as organizational goals. Employees feel that more goal-oriented reviews are benefiting them at least as much as the company.
In the contact center, performance management is often accomplished with the help of call recording and a quality assurance process. Most contact centers today are still using cobbled-together homegrown solutions, which allow them to review infrequently and may be presenting an unfair image of the process to employees. According to a recent blog post by workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo, adding an automated quality assurance (QA) system to your contact center’s quality process can reap enormous rewards.
“Not only will this streamline many of the benefits of your efforts, from agent productivity to customer service, it will also help to assure that QA is never overlooked as a business priority,” writes Ciarlo.
By creating a formal and more automated quality process, companies can review more often and utilize a system that is more objective, lowering the chances that employees feel they’ve been subjected to a single manager’s whims. In addition, says Ciarlo, the use of automated scoring systems that are built into quality assurance platforms make it easier to aggregate a variety of metrics based on specific objectives and goals. These forms deliver insight into customer satisfaction, compliance risk, agent performance and other key factors.
Managers can also use these systems to set actionable alerts that let them know when the contact center is out of adherence in some way, so they can quickly take steps to ameliorate the problems and keep them from affecting the broader contact center’s performance.
“What information do you need to know about your call center, right away?” he writes. “With alerts set up based on these triggers, actionable alerts will appear on agent screens so any necessary changes can be made before they impact customer service. Set up as many as you believe are needed, and watch how productivity improves.”
In addition to alerts, these automated quality monitoring solutions add a robust reporting layer to the contact center’s operations, providing managers with the information they need to identify training needs, respond to emerging issues and react to industry trends.