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Five Steps to Building a High Performance Organization (Part 2)      In order to have a high performance organization, it takes effort and discipline to ensure that the right processes are in place. A high performance organization involves all people in its organization providing excellent quality in both, products or services. Exceptional customer services and a continuous improvement program are also vital. The second step to be a high performance organization is to tell the people what to do, by setting expectations. In this month’s newsletter we will cover the second step of a five steps series to building a high performance organization.      If your call center is a high performance car and your people are the engine, telling them what they are expected to do clearly and specifically is the only way to run efficiently. The expectations have to be clear on the first day they take responsibility for their job. Your people need to know what must be achieved to keep the job, and what they need to do to excel.      Setting the proper expectations start by you being specific, clear, and having a measurable expectation. There are several factors to telling them what to do: Keep it Clear: In the process for ensuring that agents reach or exceed their goals you must be clear about the expectations for success at their position. You must give clear, specific details as to how to handle customers along with expected length of calls and measurable results that the agent understands for the call conclusion. For instance, you can state the amount of time given to resolve a call and that no more than a specified number can call back for the same issue. You must also have a minimum score of 9/10 for when asked about satisfaction. Sales will have to amount to a specified amount and you must sell to at least a certain percentage of the people you will talk to. After these are given and understood you then tell them that the expectation, as a general rule, should be met by a new hire within a certain amount of time, then explain how to exceed these expectation for bonuses. Set Actual Expectations: Performance expectations, at minimum, need to be specific, measurable or observable, and realistic. The main problem for management is setting expectations where management would like to see performance as opposed to making expectations realistic. If expectations are set unrealistically high, staff will either ignore the expectation or become frustrated and demotivated in attempting to achieve it. Setting a minimum as the average of the group, less one standard deviation, is usually accurate with the bonus level of performance, to help promote continuous improvement. Remember that periodically you will have to adjust the numbers to accommodate new hires and an adjusting market. Don’t Focus on One Measure Alone: If you concentrate your expectations on any one measure then you will get what you asked for, great results in one measure, perhaps to the detriment of other areas of performance. Using many measures such as call length, schedule adherence, customer opinion, call-review scores, sales per calls answered, and revenue per sale, will lead to a fair balanced performance measurement. By using all of these measures you can use these metrics to create a balanced score card providing feedback and rewarding performance based on how agents do against all the measures combined. Create a Balanced Scorecard: Creating the OPI (Overall Performance Index). The OPI is a mathematical equation that delivers a balanced overall performance measure. An example equation could look like this: OPI = (3600/Call Length) x First-call resolution x Schedule Adherence x Customer Opinion x Conversion x Revenue per sale The equation figure of 3600 is the number of seconds per hour. Using this equation you can weigh any of the categories as the importance of each of the changes. The most important thing is to grade each agent with the same equation. By doing this you have a lower limit that is a minimum, and the upper limit that indicates top-level or bonus-level performance. Remember that these measures are derived from the call center’s performance drivers that impact your business objectives. All of these measures are important, and it’s important to consider them all when setting agent performance expectations. Finally, when you tell your agents specifically what you expect of them, you’re ahead of the game. When you tell them why, you’re adding an extra level of motivation, turbo-charging that will kick-start continuous improvement.      Having the appropriate weights and measures process is the vital step in getting your organization to be high performance. Steps three through five will be revealed in following newsletters to help you take your organization even closer to excellence. The next steps include "Show them how to do it", "Give them feedback on how they are doing", and "Make supporting them your number one mission". Upon completing the five steps, your organization should see improvements in quality of service, employee morale, customer satisfaction and ultimately, your bottom line. << PreviousNext >>

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