Understanding one’s position within a competitive call-center environment is an advantage to performance. Offering statistics on the real-time performance of any individual allows a gauge of their efforts, both for their personal information, and for the management team. Allowing comparisons between the average and best performance indices of others offers a tangible metric for competition. Offering these metrics in a simple interface allows the individuals to quickly measure their performance and determine what measures they need to take to improve.
The first concern of offering metrics for a sales team is that those metrics need to reflect performance that affects the end goal of profit. With the vast amount of information gathered in any call-center environment, the possible reporting metrics are enormous. If this information is filtered down, individuals and management can see quickly what performance scales are affecting end sales, and these can be used for performance measurements, commission considerations, or other incentives to improve business.
Monetary incentives, however, are not always necessary. Depending upon the nature of the employees and environment, people may drive themselves to better performance simply by being able to see how they relate to others. Type-A personalities will constantly strive to place themselves atop the most important sales metrics. Others will measure their own performance off of this metric, and strive to compete with the leaders, or push themselves to exceed the average. Every push and improvement striving in this competitive nature adds to the sum total of these beneficial metrics, and eventually, the bottom line of the business.
This information must be displayed in a simple manner to the individuals. If the agent spends more than a few seconds trying to decipher what the metrics mean to their personal performance, then valuable time making business sales is being lost. In this situation, offering too much information can be a bad thing. While every piece of information may be useful from a management perspective, to make overall business decisions on how to improve return on investment, individuals need to be offered only a few metrics which affect their personal contributions. For a call-center, two obvious choices are call volume and total sales; however one or two other metrics may be valuable to establish the middle ground between pure call volume and quality of the calls being made.
For a quick glance statistics page, individuals should not be offered an overwhelming amount of data. For each measurable metric, it’s normally sufficient to only offer the agent an idea of what their personal performance is, the average of the sales team, the performance of the best member of the sales team, and possibly a ranking measurement. This information is easily-displayed in a simple bar chart, with metric values labeled on the bars. In this fashion, the agent gets a quick visual idea of their performance against the average and the ideal, and they also get the specific value of their efforts, to understand what improvements they need to make to improve their standing.
Grid-style displays of information, while invaluable in a realm of Excel data analysis, should be avoided in this scenario. The extra time that agents will take to locate their personal information and then relate it to the others provided within the grid, will slow the usage of the statistics, utilizing more time that could be devoted to sales. And, it offers very little, if any, benefit to the agent once they absorb the added information.
In the end, all of this information is being offered to improve the return on investment for the business. It should be viewed with an eye on how to improve efficiency, and how to improve specific measurements which affect end sales. Offer to the sales team information which will measure their performance, and their performance will improve. Ignorance may be bliss, but in a competitive call-center environment, knowing where one stands amongst their peers can be invaluable.
Jon Kight
Development Team
ClickPoint Software
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