Performance management is often perceived as one of those buzz words that corporate will use in order to drive efficiency within company departments. While such perception can encourage some to overlook the importance of the concept, many organizations are stepping up their efforts to implement solutions that actually impact performance.

In the contact center industry, many employees are in a position where their everyday activities change very little from day to day. Their goal is to handle customer interactions as efficiently as possible, while also driving other performance metrics set by corporate management.

Merely worrying about the loss of a job is rarely enough of an incentive to drive performance improvement within the contact center. And, considering the costs associated with replacing agents, the contact center cannot afford to consistently threaten job loss to spur motivation.

Instead, performance management can play a key role in actually motivating contact center employees to not only want to perform their job well, but to excel within his or her position. Why? It helps to outline the agent’s specific and important role in the overall success of the company and allows him or her to measure activities against standards and against his or her own performance.

Implementing an effective performance management strategy helps to create an empowering environment where agents take it upon themselves to determine their own performance and how it can be improved. Such an approach can not only improve overall performance of the center, but also significantly reduce the amount of time supervisors must spend in mentoring agents on areas of improvement.

An environment with an effective performance management system in place will find that agents feel a part of the larger team and that their efforts contribute to the overall failure or success of that team. Such an environment will find motivated individuals who not only seek to improve their performance, but also encourage others on their team.

Let us now forget how important such an environment is for the bottom line and for customer satisfaction. Performance management solutions can help to keep agent attrition at a manageable level, can improve first contact resolution, and increase the number of calls handled per hour for each agent. These statistics and more will help to drive costs of operation down as efficiency improves.

 

For the customer, the overall experience will be significantly heightened. When interacting with an agent in the contact center, the customer will be talking with a motivated employee that cares about the customer’s happiness. What better way to ensure customer satisfaction.

 

For more, be sure to check out the Performance Management channel on TMCnet.