Performance Management

At Sage Solutions, we are experts in the art of understanding and improving customer experiences. Our team of consultants is dedicated to helping businesses identify performance gaps, discover the root cause of issues, and develop effective solutions. We believe that strong front-line leadership is critical to any successful business, and our focus is on helping organizations build strong, effective leaders who can communicate performance objectives, analyze performance gaps, and develop coaching plans to improve individual and team performance.

Successful Performance Management

At Sage Solutions, we recognize the challenges faced by contact center management on a daily basis. For too long, entry-level supervisors have been expected to acquire management skills through osmosis or arrive on the job with these skills fully developed. We believe that effective management training and development is a must for success and we provide the necessary skills assessment and standardized training to help your supervisors and managers reach their full potential.

Meeting Operational Objectives

We offer comprehensive Performance Management training. Our courses focus on meeting operational objectives through effective planning, clear metrics, and disciplined communications. We provide you with the tools and techniques your leadership team needs to effectively measure progress and hold themselves accountable for results. Together they learn how to celebrate successes and learn from failures with our expert guidance.

Performance management in most customer service centers is ineffectual for one or more the following conditions:

Reactive Culture:

focused on crisis management responding to daily operational drama, unwilling or unable to dedicate time and talent for the proactive planning that would eliminate time consuming and repetitive problem resolution.

Metric Clutter:

When everything or the wrong things are measured, there is no focus. Performance reporting is excessive and difficult to leverage for a clear snapshot of individual or team performance. Rather than enabling effective coaching, excessive data is disabling.

Inadequate Analytic Skills:

Many call center organizations lack the analytic skills to go beyond gap identification and drill down on the root cause of performance failures. Trend and control charts are not available or are not used to direct root cause efforts. Call monitoring tends to be scorecard focused rather than leveraged as a root cause analysis tool capable of delivering actionable insights on high transaction times, poor survey scores, low resolution rates, or suboptimal revenue generation.

Ineffective Coaching:

Organizations that fail to distinguish between will based performance gaps (a choice not to perform consistently) and skill based gaps (an inability due to lack of knowledge to perform) deliver ineffective coaching because they tend to coach to the metric and goal attainment rather than the underlying root cause. Telling an agent, “Your handle time is too high, get it down,” is coaching to a metric. Explaining that AHT is high because the agent summarizes excessively represents coaching to a skill that when acquired, will lead to performance improvement.

Confusion Between Discipline and Performance Improvement:

Coaching a skill based performance gap should never be the first step in a disciplinary process. Coaching performance should be exclusively about improving performance in an individual known to have a skill or knowledge deficiency. Will based performance gaps are part of the disciplinary process and should result in termination if not corrected immediately.

Goal plan action, Business action plan strategy, outline all the necessary steps to achiev

Essential Success Factors

The critical success factors that must be met when designing, deploying, and sustaining an effective performance management system include:

Redefined Roles & Responsibilities

DITL (Day In the Life)

The best teams train their front-line supervisors to perform at or above established levels of expectation with standardized processes.

Automation

The generation of daily performance results through automated scorecards with date range capabilities enables performance gap identification, provides direction for root cause analysis, and is critical to success.
We must redefine the performance management process to rely on results rather than the excessive documentation of activities that may or may not impact results.

Leadership Support

From senior through operational leadership levels, visible support for performance management processes must be communicated with results recognized and rewarded.
Performance management should not be regarded as just another fad that will pass but rather as the new approach for how work is accomplished within the organization.
Sustainability is only possible when support and execution are mandatory.

Sage Solutions has a proven curriculum and approach which supports clients in the design and delivery of sustainable performance management processes.