We have a staff 50 Agents, 3 shifts. Morning( 20 Agents ), Evening( 20 Agents ), and Night ( 10 Agents ). Our call center/control room is open 24/7 and its not just an inbound call center, we make almost 1000 outbound calls in a day and recieve almost 1200 calls. There are 4 supervisors available in all shifts.
Can you guys tell me how to make their daily assessments? I want them to know their performance on daily basis. We are using CISCO.

Shahbaz,

I hope this wasn't a technical question, because I can't help you there. But what I would advise is that if you are going to report performance daily that you do the two following things.

1) Measure things that are important to customers. Not things that are important to managers. E.g. number of calls taken/made per day or their duration is not important to the customer so don't measure it. If you do measure these things you will skew your agents behaviour to optimise them and you may degrade customer service.

2) Understand variation. Figures will go up and down every day. And not all those movements are significant. Report the figures using Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts. Understand that figures between the limits are part of natural variation and are unworthy of comment let alone action. Work on improving the system as a whole. Not on the people and certainly not on the indiviual changes in performance day to day.

Taking Rob's lead the sorts of things you can concentrate on daily would be:
1. Adherence to Schedule - was the agent signed in when they were meant to be, failure to adhere can result in calls taking longer to be answered or even abandoned.

2. Call Quality - managers or quality coaches should screen calls (x per agent per day - depending on feedback frequency) against a script/list of must have behaviours and actions. The results of the screening should be turned into a performance score with highs and lows reported back to the agent as well as to training who can identify trends or new best practice.

3. Levels of unavailability - when not taking calls how much time is lost to non productive activities.

All of these are straight forward to measure and specific to the individual being measured. Getting them right has a profound impact on performance and customer satisfaction.

As Rob says, AHT is important but it is more of a financial measure as it determines staffing levels people use it because it's measurement is generally low cost whereas a focus on quality costs more because someone has to critique.

I agree with Julian. However we put a different slant on measuring unavailability by measuring the time agents spend helping customers. Wrap Time, Talk Time, Available time. Essentially everything but unavailable.

To the agents we are measuring what they doing, not what there not.

Hi,

This isn't a comment on what you should measure as such, but one option we were considering on our Help Desk, was to look at whether it was possible to have the Help Desk agents pull their own statistics, and complete their own daily or weekly assessment. ( I guess the frequency depends on how much time you think this may take them per day/week).

By asking agents to run the reports and document the statistics themselves, I think it would really make them take notice of what their performance in key areas are. Sometime just emailing them the stats or posting it on a board doesn't have the same impact as doing the research yourself. I find this in my own role, I will review reports, but on occasions when I've had to run a report myself, its generated questions. I think it increases their awareness.

That being said, we didn't implement it because we had issues around it, like if you show an agent how to run call, will they run statistics on their colleagues?

Hope this helps.
Thanks

Helen,

I think that could be a good idea. But I suspect that if you let agents run their own reports and document them then you need to follow through and give them control over what they do and some control over the system of work.

Empowerment (I hate that word, but can't think of a better one) has four steps:

1) Visibility. Can I view the performance?
2) Understanding. Do I know what it means?
3) Responsibility. I am held responsible for performance.
4) Control. I can change the work to improve performance.

The caveat is that the control must be over "how the work works" not over themselves. This is because 90% of performance is due to the system of work. Only 10% can be attributed to individuals.

So your plan, Helen, is on the right road, but it is only the first step to real improvement.

The caveat is that the control must be over "how the work works" not over themselves. This is because 90% of performance is due to the system of work. Only 10% can be attributed to individuals.

As far as agent performance tracking and improvement do though...you don't judge them on the 90% they can't control...you only judge them on the 10% they can.

And if they can control that 10% that concern themselves, other people will take care of the 90% "how the work works".

Maybe an analogy will serve here.

Imagine you are a 100m sprinter, with aspirations to go the the Olympics. Now imaginge that everything is decided for you by your management and coaching team. Your diet, when you go to sleep, when you wake, how long you train, the training schedule, are we in the gym today or on the track, what spikes do we use etc. All you as the sprinter are left with is the length of your stride and of course, running as fast as possible! So say you are running 9.90. You want to get faster to get to and win the Olympics. What do you do? You have control over your length of stride and you can try hard. But what if you know that you are tired when you start training at 8am having had only 4 hours sleep. Do you say nothing? Do you leave the 90% to others? Or do you talk with your coach? I would hope you would talk with your coach. And I would hope that a good coach would work with you to arrange a sleep schedule that made sure you were fresh to train in the morning.

The point is that the front line people have a view of things that their supervisors and management don't. And they can make good suggestions for improvement from that view point. But in my experience of running improvement programmes as a consultant and before that as a manager, they mostly have given up making suggestions because management have knocked them back so many times before.

Plus, how do you know which 10% is the individual. Leaving the 90% to "others" often produces nothing. Or changes that the front line workers know are rubbish, but they won't say. Leaving 90% on the table is a lot of wasted potential.

The most productive mix is when the front line are encouraged to put suggestions which are rapidly implemented by them or the management. Most of these suggestions are no cost or low cost. As long as you have a sensible performance managment system in place (which understands the variation in the system) you can see whether the change has brought about improvement. If it hasn't drop it and try something else.

"other people will take care of the 90% "how the work works"."

This is classic command and control thinking. "We are here to think. They are here to work." The main management question is, "How do we get them to do what we say?" The answer is so hard because it is the wrong question. A better question is, "How can we all improve the system to better serve our customer?" And you need to ask the question to everyone involved, including the front line workers. The workforce are bursting with ideas, management just have to get out of the way.

If you read the above it sounds like I think management are rubbish and they are doing all the wrong things. Well yes, I do think that. But I don't think it is their fault. In the same way as the workers' performance is 90% due to the system in which they work. Management style and techniques are 90% due to the business and management culture in the West. How are they supposed to know any different?

But there is a better way...