So who's measuring your management?

Call centre agents are probably subject to more assessment and measurement than any other kind of worker, Adam Faulkner asks if anyone’s measuring their management

Contact centre performance measurement should always be more about qualitative rather than quantitative metrics, and it’s what you do with that information that’s more important than the actual gathering of it!

I’ve always been a strong advocate of workforce optimisation tools, and believe that they can make a huge difference when it comes to overall contact centre performance. As such, workforce optimisation is probably more important than it was a year ago.

However workforce optimisation is a potentially broad area, and it’s also important to look beyond the agent. I thought I’d take a look at a different aspect of contact centre measurement – the measurement of team leaders and contact centre management.

Moving away from quantitative measurement

As an industry, however hard we try, it seems we still find it difficult to shake off our obsession with quantitative measurement. Take call centre management for example. Organisations typically promote their top agents and sales staff for career progression, often solely on the basis of their sales performance. It’s not uncommon for a contact centre team leader to have as many as 12 different agents as direct reports, so – without providing all the necessary management training – we regularly go ahead and drop them in at the deep end and assume everything’s going to be alright.

There doesn’t seem to be any logical connection here - just because a person regularly exceeds their targets, doesn’t mean they have the right skills to manage, coach and motivate a team. Indeed, often the strengths required to drive a strong sales performance are very different to the understanding and listening skills needed to recognise agents’ own particular drivers and leverage them to drive towards shared business objectives.

Some organisations have already started to recognise this challenge, and are now using software solutions that help ensure their contact centre management have the right credentials to manage their team or teams of agents. These solutions typically work by enabling a business to first establish what an ideal contact centre manager/team leader looks like, and then measures each prospective manager against this standard by evaluating their performance against pre-defined criteria.

Once such a solution has measured capability to a qualification level, the prospective manager can take an online exam and receive appropriate internal accreditation. Such an approach can help ensure a consistent quality standard across a contact centre’s management and team leaders. It can also provide a basis for ongoing management development, with managers effectively continuing to train and assess themselves in the key areas that can help agents to deliver the right behaviour for customers.

Adopting a ‘dance card’ approach

However, defining the ‘right behaviour’ for agents is often difficult for contact centres to measure. One leading financial services organisation is addressing this through a distinctive ‘dance card’ approach, where it encourages agents to modify their behaviour according to either the type of caller or their current mood. Again, this requires basic listening and understanding skills. If a caller is angry, there’s not a lot of point in being overly upbeat and cheerful!

Where the dance card concept helps is in assessing the type and style of behaviour that might be most suitable for a specific caller. For example, if the caller is an older customer, then it would be more appropriate to adopt a more formal tone, addressing them as Mr. Smith rather than John, and not being overfamiliar. On the dance card, such an approach might be a waltz, whereas the agent could choose to adopt a rumba or salsa style with a younger customer.

As a metaphor, the dance card concept works particularly well as it encourages a greater level of intimacy with the customer, and it requires the agent to consider which dance style would be most appropriate for each call. It’s an approach that’s working well for the financial services company in question, and they’re already seeing benefits in terms of improved customer satisfaction and increased agent retention.

So when it comes to measurement, don’t just think about your traditional metrics. By measuring and assessing less tangible factors such as team manager capabilities and customer empathy, organisations can unlock significant additional value within their contact centres.