Performance improvement

Answer my seven questions and you’ll be ready for a boost in performance

Great leaders inspire and motivate, says Peter Venn, of Academee.  And that leads to greater customer satisfaction.  His advice is in the form of seven questions

THE key to unlocking the performance of your people is great leadership – not systems and processes.  Great leaders inspire and motivate others to achieve shared goals.
Great leaders also offer support and guidance to enable others to take control of their own workload.  This can be a real challenge in call centres, many of which are heavily automated, regulated and supervised.  However, if you can answer the following seven questions, you will be in a great place to kick-start a performance improvement programme that inspires and motivates your people and improves customer satisfaction.

Do your people understand their contribution?   The average agent can take more than 100 customer calls in a day.   That’s 100 opportunities to create satisfaction, 100 ways to show the organisation cares, or 100 customer service disasters.
In call centres, a key issue is the relationship between the agent, the customer and the systems.  At the end of a shift, most people like to have something tangible that they can use to recognise, for themselves, how productive they have been.  Call centre systems don't make this easy.  Once an agent has spoken to a customer, the screen goes blank, ready for the next call. At the end of the day, advisors will typically have NOTHING to show for their effort.  This fundamental truth can work against staff morale.

Understand the value of a call…you can use it to make the connection between what an agent does (or doesn't do)

Smart call centres know this and work hard to communicate the impact that agents have within the business. They publish daily (sometimes hourly) statistics and, more than this, they make those statistics come to life in a way that demonstrates how what they do contributes to the business as a whole.
Do this and your people will develop a stronger feeling of community in the business, their self-esteem will improve and they will start to feel genuinely empowered to make a difference.

Do they know the value of each call they handle?  Do you?  If we understand the monetary value of a call, we can use that to show the impact of providing all-round great service and achieve buy-in.  We can even change the culture.
For example, many call centres are moving from a very transactional model (customer calls, agent answers the question) to a relationship focus where the agent points out opportunities for new products and services that align with the customer's previous buying history or lifestyle choices.
In many cases, call centres struggle to make the culture change from “customer service” to “sales”.  Agents complain that they are being expected to do something they didn't join the organisation to do.  Managers often feel that they are on the back foot as they try to “position” the culture change, yet fail to engage with their people.
When you understand the value of a call, you can use it to make the connection between what an agent does (or doesn't do) and the overall performance of the organisation.  Here's a simple example:

So the average value of ALL calls is £11.25 (£112,500 divided by 10,000).  If the profit on each sale is 25 per cent, the total profit per day is £28,125, or £2.81 per call.  Therefore, if an agent handles 100 calls per day on target, that person is achieving £281.25 profit for the organisation.
This sounds a lot, yet to identify the “true” figure that represents the value of the agent to the business we need to subtract the “fully loaded” cost of employing that person.  This cost – typically more than £18,000 a year -- includes elements for management support, pensions and other benefits, the cost of the seat, subsidised canteen, etc.
This is a fantastic tool to help staff identify for themselves the difference they can make -- and the long-term career benefits to them -- of moving to a more pro-active “sales through service” culture.  Talk about it, celebrate it when it improves, and you'll see a marked behaviour change.
Offering a good range of incentives and benefits that link directly to their value can contribute to individual performance.   However it is important to remember that positive feedback and public recognition can also really motivate people.

Managers who spend most of their time analysing statistics could be watching, in minute detail, the sinking of the ship

This will drive better conversations with real sincerity, because they'll understand precisely the motivation of the customer and be able to relate 100 per cent to that.  The customer experience will improve, and your people will know that they've made a difference which, in itself, will improve morale and motivation.  Help your people to develop a positive attitude, rather than simply using positive language, and this will translate into better service, better sales and better employee engagement.
Coaching provides powerful support.  Effective coaching helps individuals to define and achieve performance goals.

We all need signposts

Do your leaders emotionally engage with your staff as well as focusing on the rational things?  The emotional intelligence of great leaders is what separates them from run-of-the-mill managers.   A true leader will demonstrate these competencies and understand why they are important in the process of creating the right environment for people performance.
A true leader can create a compelling vision that attracts people and inspires them towards the goal.
A true leader heals team rifts, motivates during stressful times, builds long-term capabilities through coaching, encouraging ideas, sets the pace and provides a kick-start when needed to turnaround a crisis or deal with problems.
In doing this, a true leader engages with people on an emotional level.  This avoids people feeling "processed" by the system and further encourages them to work as a team.

Is your overall culture genuinely people-focused?   Does your organisation communicate information openly and honestly?  No one likes to be treated like a cultivated mushroom -- kept in the dark and drip-fed.  We all like to feel involved and, given that some information will be confidential or timely, we feel better when we know that we are being told stuff.
An interesting point here is that, in some employee surveys, companies score low on communication even when they are actually communicating a lot.  Perhaps what they are not doing is telling people that they are communicating.  We all need signposts sometimes, and when we signpost regularly to "keeping you in the picture", people eventually understand.

Is your learning and development classroom-based…and gets pulled when service levels are at risk?  Consider “bite-sized” learning opportunities, which fit easily into the working day.
For example, if you forecast calls in 15-minute slots, use some of these slots to introduce elearning modules or learning podcasts.  Research indicates that 15 minutes is the optimum period for maximum learning retention.
Some smart centres are even using their ACDs to broadcast bite-sized learning, team briefs and business bulletins that ensure consistency, enable huge delivery economies and even provide a utilisation analysis.
Management is rarely about systems; it is usually about people.  Managers who spend most of their time analysing statistics could be watching, in minute detail, the sinking of the ship.
For us to make a real difference, we must engage with our people.  We must show them why they are important, encourage them to be creative, talk about the value they bring to the organisation and help them understand their customer's drivers.
We must create a coaching culture in which coaching is seen as a tool for the long-term, an enabler for everyone and beneficial to the business, its people and its customers.
Call centres are often the un-sung heroes of a business where their profiles can be low.  Working internally, we can create a motivation cycle through understanding and talking about the value of what we do.  Then working externally in the business, we can really shout about our successes and how the centre is contributing to the business goals.
I recommend that every manager spends a while every month talking to customers.  Some centres expand on that idea and encourage people from the whole business to "listen and learn", to understand what their customers are saying to us and just how good they actually are at handling them.
Other centres involve the whole business in charitable activities.
Having managed a centre during Comic Relief, I can absolutely recommend this as a way of a centre gaining a new respect throughout the business.  People from outside begin to understand the dynamics of handling call after call, interpreting accents and poor line connections and generally working on a production line.
Engage your people; engage your centre at the heart of the business.  If you do that, you’ll notice the stats improve as people feel motivated to achieve and feel that they have true influence to make a difference in the business

Profile

Peter Venn is a consultant with Academee, a specialist in blended learning.  In 20 years, he has developed and delivered learning solutions across a wide range of industries.  Mr Venn has specialised experience in call centres and has contributed to the design and build of several pan-European operations.  An early pioneer of elearning, he has designed and implemented a number of highly successful blended solutions for blue chip clients.  He speaks at major call centre seminars and conferences.

Contact Mr Venn at: peter.venn@academee.com