Johannesburg, 19 Nov 2014
Delivering relevant and timely performance measurements across people and technologies has been an ongoing challenge for contact centre managers.
Performance management applications address this issue by allowing managers to continuously monitor, measure and improve contact centre business processes.
By providing scorecards and interaction analysis contact centre employees can stay focused on the organisation's key performance indicators (KPIs), performance management drives improvements across all areas of the contact centre to help companies realise cross-functional alignment with strategic goals.
Performance management applications enable a structured process through which a company can take steps to improve overall performance against key metrics. These applications can initiate and track actions automatically in response to a performance problem, thereby reducing reliance on supervisor and manager diligence.
Executives can view the overall performance, or drill down to an individual to see any performance issues in their organisation.
The ultimate goal is to align everyone in the organisation so they are working towards the same set of goals, and give the company a much greater chance of achieving those goals.
Performance management ultimately helps create a performance-based culture in which each level of the organisation is empowered with the information it needs to align performance with corporate objectives. In this way, organisations can easily identify the root cause of issues hindering performance and take corrective action to resolve them.
Because every organisation and its related business process have different objectives, KPIs will vary by company. Whatever those metrics may be, the contact centre must communicate those KPIs to frontline employees to ensure every member of the team can see how they are contributing to the business - increasing the likelihood of creating a performance-based culture.
Automated alerts and workflows, configurable forms and dashboards, and interactive analytics allow all employees to know where they stand relative to expectations. Performance management provides on-demand, personalised views of KPIs versus goals that empower staff to manage their own performance against their targets.
If agents miss their individual targets, the system can automatically notify supervisors or managers and initiate coaching workflows.
Performance management applications can also automatically initiate needs-based coaching sessions so a personalised performance improvement plan can be put in place. Information captured during coaching sessions is stored in the system and can be used to determine the impact of the coaching plan on agent performance.
Companies are also beginning to look at how contact centre performance management can be integrated with back-office applications like financial databases, CRM solutions and fulfilment. When the information and data from all contact centre applications are synchronised with performance optimisation solutions and back-end systems, companies will be able to attain a full view of the contact centre connected with the enterprise. A synchronised suite of performance optimisation solutions can provide this holistic view.
Performance management provides a holistic view of the organisation that allows the contact centre to change processes and staffing on the fly with full understanding of the impact on customers' perceptions of service and value. This creates the greatest of business advantages ? meaningful competitive differentiation.
DMG Consulting projects contact centre performance management revenue will increase by 14% per year from 2014 through 2016.
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