Eircom, an Irish telecommunications
company providing voice, data and Internet services to a residential
customer base of over one million subscribers, spear-heads the marketplace
with sales campaigns that are making the company a world leader in its
field. The key to their success was the adoption of employee performance
management and the deployment of the Emvolve Performance Manager.
THE BACKGROUND
Established in 1984, eircom was a government regulated company operating
in a virtual monopoly. With market deregulation in 1999, the landscape
changed dramatically and overnight the company was faced with a growing
number of competitors who were quickly gaining market share. eircom's
challenge was to find a way to truly differentiate themselves, claw back
market share and win back customers.
Today, eircom's success is unparalleled. Not only have they excelled in
overcoming their challenges by successfully executing world-class sales
campaigns, but they have also achieved the holy grail of increasing
revenues while driving costs down.
INNOVATIVE TECHNIQUES DRIVING SUCCESS
A significant contributor to eircom's success has been their fundamental
belief that the front line employees operating in their Telesales and
Service Center were key to differentiating the company from competition.
This belief laid the groundwork for the introduction of employee
performance management -- a simple concept that involves setting clear
expectations for employees, providing them with daily feedback on their
performance, training them when they do poorly and rewarding them when
they do well. In effect, this empowers employees to take ownership of
their own performance and drive improvement.
The success has
been outstanding; eircom's Telesales and Service Center has exceeded all
expectations, delivering results that have secured eircom's business
success and market leadership. Results that impacted both the top and the
bottom line; delivering a return on investment in less than six months.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
While eircom clearly understood that employee performance management was
critical to their success, finding a way to execute the strategy in a
simple, user friendly and automated manner was the challenge. What they
found was Emvolve Performance Manager from Performix Technologies, a
tried and tested solution that proved to be a real winner for their
business and employees.
"Not only has Emvolve Performance Manager met our needs, but it
has delivered huge benefits far beyond initial expectations of the
organization," said Eoin Dunne, head of eircom's Telesales and
Service Center.
For eircom, Emvolve Performance Manager delivered a consistency and
clarity to performance management and information that was previously
impossible to achieve. The solution integrates data from eircom's existing
measurement systems (ACD, CRM, Quality and various in-house databases) to
provide a complete picture of performance across the entire business.
"Emvolve Performance Manage takes the volume and quality data and
puts it into a form that provides us a single and dynamic picture of
performance. Every day -- all day, I know exactly how we are performing.
It allows me to drill down to identify the key elements of what is going
wrong and what is going right," said Dunne. "By integrating all
our existing data and turning it into real performance intelligence, I am
able to diagnose and manage for improved performance in a way that was not
possible before."
TARGETED DEVELOPMENT
The role and focus of eircom's team leaders within their Telesales and
Service Center has been transformed. Employed to coach and develop front
line agents, the reality was such that team leaders actually spent 50
percent of their time carrying out administrative duties. Now that
repetitive processes are automated, team leaders have time to dedicate to
the value adding work of coaching agents.
"Our aim was to have team leaders spend 70-80 percent of their
time coaching and listening to agents, and Emvolve Performance Manager has
enabled us to achieve this -- you can imagine the impact it has made on
our performance," said Dunne.
Emvolve Performance Manager has delivered results of increased
productivity and revenue while simultaneously reducing costs, by bringing
a clear focus and balance to the day-to-day activities of all employees.
By aligning employees' targets with eircom's critical business objectives,
Emvolve transformed lofty corporate goals into specific and understandable
activities for employees. In addition, the solution enabled eircom to
provide daily online performance results to each employee, bringing
objectivity and transparency to performance.
"Thanks to Emvolve, our agents know every day, week and month
exactly what their objectives and targets are, and when they have exceeded
or missed them... This awareness creates motivation and drives continual
improvement. Agents are able to quantify, verify and check their
performance results daily, driving ownership of performance down to each
individual," explained Dunne.
MOTIVATION THROUGH REWARD
Another big breakthrough was Emvolve's reward and recognition module,
which eircom uses to drive their bonus calculations and payments, creating
a strong and visible link for employees between what they did today and
how it impacts their pockets.
"Agents know exactly how much of a bonus they will earn each
quarter as the performance results they see daily in Emvolve Performance
Manager drive the performance related pay scheme -- a real motivator for
our people", said Dunne.
The successful execution of Employee Performance Management has taken
eircom from market defense to market leadership. It has resulted in
increased revenues, decreased costs and world-class sales conversion
campaigns.
Rosemary Turley is vice president of global marketing for Performix Technologies.
Performix specializes in the area of performance improvement. The
company's powerful and practical solutions are designed to deliver
exceptional results to business performance through people. Established in
1998, Performix focuses on the worldwide contact center marketplace. They
combine hands-on experience of this market with innovative solutions which
deliver tangible business benefits to their clients. |