Service Agent: Performance Managment

Staff Management, Performance, Motivation and Development are issues critical to any business.

But for a Customer Service Department these issues often influence the environment decidedly more.

Team Building, Culture, and Management’s Philosophy or Approach contributes to the environment.

Integrating these influences successfully will improve Agent Performance and your Satisfaction Levels but what are the critical relationships to GET RIGHT?

How you manage individual agents and how you develop a team or call centre culture is uniquely related.

Sales teams are often managed using statistics like; how many units sold or dollars earnt. Unfortunately many companies manage their customer service teams in a similar manner like; how many calls made, downtime, response time etc. This is a quantity metric method and it creates a machine like environment where agents are essentially competing against one another to take the most calls or emails.

Like Sales this makes Customer Service a Numbers Game. This method has proven to fail, for the Call Center, for the Company, and for the Customers.

Customer Service is a People Game full of relationship building, listening and thinking.

A model that ignites a statistical competitiveness in a Customer Service environment is not going to nurture a culture of listening or supporting your customers. More than often your customers will be put through a systematic process (that you have designed) to automate or make methodical each customer interaction.

This model impacts cultural and environmental elements in many ways.

• It’s unlikely a competitive environment will be supportive or sharing, so Agents are less likely to be helping each other.
• Management will be pre-occupied with center stats rather than the difference the service they are delivering is making to the whole business. How can a manager ensure each interaction is quality if they’re department is evaluated by how many calls they take?
• Agents are less likely to undertake or be involved in performance improvement plans unless they are not meeting targets
• Attendance and staff retention rates are likely to be worse contributing to lower morale and job satisfaction levels.
• Due to increased turnover of staff management are likely to spend more time training and supporting newer staff rather than developing an experienced team to achieve more.
• You will start including holidays to a sunny resort and monthly bonuses to your staff as incentives worsening the performance of your team, and devaluing your customers experience further. (By driving the Agents attention else where).

So how do you change? How do you instigate and ignite a culture that’s empowered, sharing, caring, adding value and successful?

The objective of the Customer Service Center is to look after the companies customers whether they are pre,current, or post customers they are all stakeholders interacting with the company.

The success of the Customer Service Department should be solely determined by the satisfaction of its customers.

You could use any or all of the following to satisfy reporting requirements:

• Customer Sampling – Follow-up calls usually 1 to 2 weeks after the customer last called the contact center asking a range of questions around overall experience, satisfaction with answers given, were they properly informed etc.
  • This has a low answer rate and can still remain impersonal and automated
  • Often the people making the calls are not connected to the company and cannot act on any issues

• Customer Surveys – Usually done annually by a Research Company – Usually with similar questions as above but could be incentivized or rewarded
• Focus Groups – Usually done through a Research Company to ‘dig deeper’ into common result patterns.
• Agent Customer Ratings – This is a customer rated system where an Agents response is scored by the customer/enduser with a simple YES or NO (or 1-5) question like “Did {Agent Name} answer your question or provide a suitable solution for you?”
  • On clicking their preference the customer would open a web page showing results and or a small gift, bonus or voucher for answering.
  • Each Agent could follow themselves and their team mates scores on big screens or dashboards adding a positive spin on the competitiveness. Each office could be measured against each other.

With a Customer generated performance measure training can become “issue” based with built in boundaries, possible critical incidents and solutions.

Training by the Issue helps when you start evaluating your Agents performance using this system. The emails or calls or interactions your agents score worst in will be sorted by common issue or scenario so you can facilitate the right training and development programs.

It helps you identify whether a problem for one Agent is Team Wide or isolated. 

This method has independence and strength as it’s the customers rating the Agents and not an internal process/evaluation, so it has more meaning.

Initially its likely your team will show there fear of the customer as they actually start to respect and appreciate how they deal with situations. It’s a mental shift.

This Customer Centric, Customer Driven, approach will start (with positive coaching and fun) a culture of support (Help people to buy from you), customer care, positive reward and will be constantly adding value to every relationship, The Customer,  The Company and The Agent.

Now Thats “360° Service”

Now That’s a Culture of Improvement, Empowerment and Satisfaction.