Best Practices and Trends for Performance Management

If you don’t think performance management is a critical part of your organization, think again. The turnover and low productivity of disengaged employees costs the average 1,000-agent contact center more than $2,000,000 per year.

You can’t measure what you’re not monitoring, and when it comes to employee performance, how can you expect to see improvements if you don’t even know the starting point? NICE Systems (News - Alert), a provider of workforce optimization solutions, set out to find just how many companies are focusing on performance management and what some of the best practices are when it comes to visibility into employee performance.

In the company’s recent benchmark study, it compared many of its findings to a 2006 study by Merced Systems (News - Alert), which NICE acquired in 2012, and shared the same audience and many of the same questions. The study explored areas such as driving employee engagement and improving the customer experience.

From the 2006 study to the most recent study, NICE found that there was a big leap in the amount of performance data collected and communicated – 72 percent of organizations use multiple systems to track employee performance – but also saw a big response in companies naming complexity as their biggest pain point (57 percent). The solution to managing multiple sources and still improving the customer experience and employee satisfaction is alignment around common data and goals to efficiently drive results.

Happy employees mean happy customers. Unfortunately for many of the survey’s respondents, their vision of the type of customer service they were providing did not match up against their customers’. Eighty-five percent of respondents said they were meeting or exceeding their customer satisfaction goals – a similar finding to the 2006 study, where 80 percent of companies said they offered “great” customer experience, but only 8 percent of their customers claimed the experience they had was “great”.

“Employee engagement is a prerequisite to delivering an exceptional customer experience,” said Yochai Rozenblat, president of the NICE Enterprise Group, in a statement. “Other research has shown that service workers are the only type of employees that are less engaged today than they were three years ago. In order to remedy this, organizations should introduce bottom-up strategies like collaboration and gamification, both of which are included in our recently-launched NICE Performance Management v6.2 solution. We believe our solution can help companies gain a competitive edge in the market.”

There is a growing focus on performance management, which will lead to performance-driven cultures that consistently deliver great customer experiences at a lower cost of care.

How does your organization stack up? Find out by reading the entire NICE benchmark report.