Remember its incentives that drive behaviour!

It’s probably fair to say that none of us ever really starts the year off with Change Management high on our list of priorities. Instead, these are typically the kind of projects that are thrust upon us, maybe as a by-product of a strategic business initiative aimed at increasing sales revenues or at reducing costs, or as part of a broader initiative to improve customer satisfaction.

From a contact centre perspective, one of the most useful tools to help implement a successful Change Management programme is the Balanced Scorecard which focuses attention on the measures that actually drive performance. Rather than simply concentrate on financial objectives, a Balanced Scorecard can be used to look across all a contact centre’s different operational disciplines: people, processes, technology and customers. It can be used to help identify some of the technologies, such as a new CRM system, an IP infrastructure, a self-service solution or a quality monitoring environment, that could be successfully deployed to help effect any necessary changes.

How might this work in practice? Let’s take the example of an organisation that wants to evolve its contact centre from being a purely inbound operation to become more of a sales-oriented environment. A shift like this can have far-reaching implications that impact other areas of the business.

Businesses can potentially spend hundreds of thousands of pounds developing a clear strategic vision, but all too often it’s watered down – or simply ignored – by the time it gets through to individual agents in the contact centre. So agent behaviour will be essential to the success of the transition. Those agents that don’t want to actively sell clearly won’t adapt easily or quickly to their new environment. At the same time, many processes within the contact centre will need to change in order to help agents to cross- and up-sell to customers without negatively impacting customer service levels.

Technology would also play a key role in our example Change Management project, perhaps by using integrated ACD, CRM and CTI systems to allow agents to identify the caller quickly and have immediate visibility of a caller’s previous transactions and relevant offer details to help enable effective selling. However, all the process and technology changes are unlikely to be successful unless we can be confident that the individual agents are able to successfully manage the transition from inbound response to sales.

Incentives drive behaviour

This is where a properly-structured Balanced Scorecard approach can prove invaluable to the Change Management process – particularly one that goes beyond the obvious measures, and starts to address real world success factors. It’s all very well for the CEO to deliver strategic pronouncements about becoming more efficient or improving customer satisfaction, but for any Change Management programme to be successful it has to work across the organisation – from the board room right through to the contact centre floor. And if it’s to succeed at this level, it’s got to be personal for the agents.

Time and again, we see how incentives drive behaviour – both good and bad – within the contact centre. That’s why it’s important to build some form of incentive approach into your Change Management Balanced Scorecard, not just to initiate change but also to make things much more personal for agents and actually incent them to change their operational behaviour.

We’re still finding that many incentive programmes are still operated manually and – while better than nothing – I suspect that these initiatives aren’t taking full advantage of the potential of integrated incentivisation. Unfortunately many incentive programmes never get through to an implementation stage because they’re just too complicated to administer. We often find random Excel-based systems in place, and these typically involve lengthy and expensive re-keying processes for the HR department, which has a significant resource impact.

Those organisations that instead are adopting an integrated incentive compensation approach combining their Balanced Scorecard with incentives are managing to achieve closer alignment with their corporate goals.

Where applicable, we encourage organisations to work towards closer integration between their Incentive compensation and HR systems . By integrating closely with standard HR solutions, organisations can clearly identify which agent did what, and who’s performing in line with their Balanced Scorecard goals. With this information, rewards can be both cost-effectively and consistently delivered to agents.

Ensuring that agent bonuses, incentives and recognition packages are all aligned with corporate goals, makes good sense from a business point of view, but it’s also important to make sure that it works both ways. Some organisations have developed an ‘Agent Homepage’ approach, where agents can monitor their Top Six KPIs, and track their own rewards and performance. This gives agents immediate feedback, and they can easily see just what they need to do to achieve their targets and meet their bonus requirements.

By re-enforcing the behaviour needed to drive change in the contact centre, organisations can actively contribute to the success of their Change Management projects.