The journey to true contact centre optimisation

The journey towards true contact centre optimisation, and contact centre technology is nothing without the people and processes to support its effective use.

This is especially true when it comes to workforce optimisation (WFO), or how to get the best out of the people in your contact centre. Many UK contact centres have already made great steps in terms of initial performance improvement. For some this has involved putting a workforce management (WFM) programme into place, for others the focus has been on recording, performance monitoring or e-training.

So far so good, but WFO tools such as WFM or call recording can only go so far – they can help a contact centre and its agents achieve their short-term goals, but how exactly do you make sure your contact centre is actually performing against clear corporate objectives? And how can you incentivise your agents and their behaviour to help them to achieve these goals?

Perhaps it’s time for some joined up customer service thinking here. It seems like there’s been a link missing between most contact centres’ WFO strategies and their corporate objectives. Organisations seem to find it relatively easy to define the efficiency metrics for a contact centre operation, but when it comes to establishing the lead indicators for effectiveness it’s often more difficult to nail down just what ‘good performance’ actually is.

Moving towards a Balanced Scorecard approach

One of the tools that is best placed to address this important gap is the Balanced Scorecard approach. Unlike traditional contact centre performance measurements – which focus on metrics-based reports such as ‘how quickly calls are answered’ or ‘how many calls are in the queue’ - a Balanced Scorecard enables organisations to integrate a far broader range of KPIs covering people, process and technology issues into their daily reporting.

The most successful Balanced Scorecards to date have been those that aim to align a company’s strategy with key performance objectives at every level of an organisation. We’re finding scorecards can cover a range of categories, including financial performance, customer performance, internal performance and even innovation performance.

It’s important that people know what they’re supposed to be doing, and Balanced Scorecards allow a consistent cascade of objectives from the most general corporate level right through to individual agent targets. Indeed, companies can now equip each agent with their own scorecard to help them identify their own best performance track. It also needn’t just be about numbers – an effective scorecard could cover more obvious factors such as customer service scores and sales conversion performance, but would also address how a particular agent was progressing with training and development – perhaps seeing how skills gaps identified by call recording were being addressed.

Balanced Scorecards can help every customer service team and each individual agent understand the KPIs that they have control and responsibility for. This way, contact centre staff feel valued and can appreciate the impact that their part of the business has on the overall success of their organisation as a whole.

Enabling incentive management

Keeping a scorecard is all very well, but you still need to incentivise employees to deliver on their scorecard objectives. By linking scorecards with incentives, organisations can align bonus, incentive and recognition packages with corporate goals – setting targets for employees, providing motivation to meet those targets and rewarding them on how well they perform against their individual goals.

Two of the most successful methods of incentivising agents and driving their behaviour are competitions with prizes and peformance-related pay. By integrating closely with standard HR solutions, rewards can be cost-effectively delivered – identifying who did what and when, and ensuring that the individual or team is credited.

Using this approach, agent incentives can be geared according to a wide range of sophisticated metrics such as sales, service and satisfaction indicators. Agents can also track their own rewards and performance, giving them the information they need to help meet their own personal targets. Traditionally this kind of incentive management approach has always been a highly complex procedure. With some of the latest solutions, however, incentives can now be mapped onto a wide range of sophisticated metrics. More advanced solutions even now allow a certain degree of self-service where agents can track their own rewards and performance, and adjust their own behaviour and energies to help meet their own personal targets.

Combining these three important approaches – Workforce Optimisation, the Balanced Scorecard and Employee Incentivisation – provides contact centres with a powerful framework for performance improvement. WFO gives employees the tools they need to do a quality job, the Balanced Scorecard tells them exactly what it is they need to do, while the HR element ensures that people are correctly incentivised to meet their scorecard objectives.

One organisation that is setting the standard in this area is BT, which has implemented a people, compensation and recognition plan for its Ł600 million contact centre operation. Using effective employee engagement tools, BT has driven through an impressive contact centre transformation programme, and delivered back massive cost reductions. Clearly this project is on a major scale, but we’re convinced that by extending WFO to embrace key functions such as agent incentives and skills monitoring – and then driving its success with effective Balanced Scorecards - organisations can take an important next step towards achieving best practice workforce optimisation for their contact centre.