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Five Steps to Building a High Performance Organization (Part 5)      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 and services. Exceptional customer services and continuous improvement programs are also vital. The fifth and final step to becoming a high performance organization is to make supporting the agents your number-one mission. In this month's newsletter, we will cover the final step of a five step series to building a high performance organization.      If your call center is a high performance car and your people are the engine, supporting them is the tune-ups required to keep them running at optimum efficiency. Support for a large call center includes giving the agents a little help when they need it. Supporting them includes clearing the way to helping the agents achieve and maximize their skills and level of motivation.      Good support will remove the barriers to success, while poor support is a tremendous de-motivator. The worst part of poor support takes place in a large call center where agents can get together and compare notes on the poor support they are receiving. There are 2 specific areas of support required for agents to succeed, on the job/process related and career/work-life related. The steps to developing a good support structure are as follows: Helping agents do their job: Call center job support amounts to being available to answer questions as they arise. The difference between support and training is that support happens immediately and it relates to a specific situation, usually when your agent has a customer or prospect on hold waiting for an answer. Newer agents need a lot of support, where more experienced agents may not need as much support, but in either case, it must be accessible within seconds. Newer agents may become disillusioned if help is not readily available, where more experienced agents may become frustrated with no support. The best practice is to, at any time, have a supervisor within a few seconds of reach for any agent who needs help. This can be accomplished with a supervisor located at every few rows of desks. Using a help desk to provide support remotely: This is essentially building a call center for a call center. In this scenario, support staff man a remote desk and when agents need help, instead of looking for a supervisor, they call a help desk. Just like customers, the agents wait in a queue for the next available help desk agent during peak calling times. If there is a large demand for support requests, the help desk can be a real benefit for the following reasons: Increased cost control - By using the queue method, you effectively have the ability to assess the best people to man the support desk, but also the ability to know how many agents to have on staff for peak hours. Tracking of support statistics - Having supervisors logged in to the phone system provides much greater reporting options, including requests received, average time to process a request, and speed of service to provide support. Reporting on question type - Applications that track the type and frequency of questions are valuable in that they can provide managers with the tools to determine what types of questions their supervisors are getting. Mangers can then target areas of training required and determine which agents require specific training. Offering career/work-life support: Although work-life support is less frequent than on the job support, it is no less important and cannot simply be placed into a queue for the next available supervisor to answer. An agent may want to discuss issues such as vacation time, sick leave, doctors appointments, pay raises, advancement opportunities, disputes, conflicts, concerns, and so on. These situations are best handled one-on-one with the agents’ supervisor, preferably in private. This may be difficult, but your employees’ quality of work life and overall staff morale will increase. Meeting the challenges of the call center supervisor: The responsibility of both performance management and agent support pose a difficult task for any one person. Awareness of your supervisors’ time is of the utmost importance. The best practice involves agent support supervisors on the floor to help agents, while other managers maintain the performance management of the agents. Determining the right number of supervisors: There are many questions to ask when trying to determine the number of supervisors to handle both support and agent performance. The following questions can be used to determine if you have scheduled sufficient supervisory resources: Are you providing job-related support in a timely fashion? - If you are using a help desk for the call center, then the stats should tell you directly if you have enough supervisors to cover the required help. Are you getting all the performance management done? - If coaching and performance management is well documented, reviewing the documentation will help determine the volume and quality of coaching being done. What do the supervisors have to say? - You can simply ask, or do a variety of surveys of agent focus groups and they will tell you loud and clear, if only you ask.      Agent performance management is one of the most powerful tools available to optimize and improve call center performance. Central to the idea of agent performance management is the alignment between corporate and call center objectives and agent goals, objectives, and direction. Done well, no other process will do more to achieve corporate and call center objectives than agent performance management. Now that you have completed 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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