Performance management in practice

1. Performance management in practice
Call Centers, or customer services receiving and transmitting multiple requests by
telephone, were introduced as offshoots of telecommunications providing streamlined
service for consumers of large companies with extensive customer support needs.
Normally, a call center is able to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time,
i.e. to screen calls and forward them to skilled support staff, where most issues can be
resolved. Organizations starting from mail-order catalog companies and telemarketing
companies to computer product help desks use call centers.
Typically, there are two types of calls ? inbound and outbound. The latter suggests the
agent's calling potential customers with intentions to sell or service which is amply used
in telemarketing. Apart from it inbound calls are made by the customer to get information
or ask for help reporting malfunction of the product.
That's where the problem of management performance is acute. Performance measures
and benchmarking are indispensable to any well-run call center to eliminate criticism of
call centers on common themes such as non-expert operators, poor training of agents
incapable to process customers' requests effectively, automated queuing systems resulting
in long hold times, operators working from a script, etc. Benchmarking, typically
associated with strategic management, presupposes evaluation of business processes in
relation to best practice and helps to develop plans with the aim of increasing
performance levels. At large benchmarking reforms all the levels of the company ? from
the state of mind of the employees to that of top managers, penetrating into the whole
hierarchical organization of the organization. The gist of benchmarking is to break the
resistance to change by employing methods different from the currently used ones that
might be less effective in order to increase certain aspects of performance.
The most conspicuous performance measures include the mean conversation time, or
Average Talk Time (ATT), the time of delay a caller may experience waiting while
queuing, the mean dealing time, or Average Handling Time (AHT), the number of calls
(%) answered within the limited period, or Service Level (SL%), the number of calls per
hour the operator handles, the number of calls (%) with the customer's problem
completely resolved and others.
A variety of different technologies enables companies to measure and monitor the
performance of the workers. The Balanced scorecard, introduced by R.S. Kaplan and D.
Norton in 1992, is a concept for measuring a company's activities to make managers
focus on the important performance metrics that lead to success. It's not only financial
outcomes that are in focus, but the human issues that drive those outcomes. Thus, it is
said to balance the financial perspective with customer, process and employee
perspectives. Since the time of the original concept the scorecard metrics have been
revisited by Kaplan & Norton with regard to more than a decade's experience.

2. Typically the following processes are on the move when the scorecard is implemented:
translating the vision into operational goals, linking the vision to individual performance,
business planning, learning and adjusting the strategy according to the feedback. To
improve the performance of call centers one should know what metrics are best qualified.
The right metrics should be performed on a call center to fulfill the scorecard.
The hallmark of a good call center is the staff's call management skills and that means
interactive training can help achieve excellence at different levels ? for the agents,
supervisors and managers. It is essential for managers to know how to recruit and train
the staff to reach the strategic goals of the company, to manage the key metrics and
consequently improve performance.
Different programs are designed to deliver training to call center teams. They might
include practice, role-play, feedback and coaching. As keeping customers satisfied is a
primary concern of any call center training courses feature quality programs which
enhance the performance with respect to one of the most urgent demands ? training
skillful professionals. It means they employ different training methods to evaluate current
training processes and measure and improve training effectiveness. Fertile training leads
to reinforcing the appropriate skills for performance improvement and achieving higher
levels of customer loyalty.
http://performanceappraisalebooks.info/ : Over 200 ebooks, templates, forms for
performance appraisal.