TMCnet LOGIN
Webinars
Dynamic Enterprise Feature Editorial
October 01, 2010
Empower Employees by Providing Real-Time Visibility to Performance and Productivity
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor
Employees are often the gateway to customer satisfaction as they are the one point of contact between the company and the customer. This is especially true within the customer-facing departments, such as contact centers or customer service divisions. While these employees are hired to deliver optimal customer experiences, they are not likely to grow and improve in performance if they don’t have a clear picture of where they are and where they should be.
To help employees to gain access to the information they need, enterprises today are implementing business intelligence and operational metrics. Such tools help the organization and its employees to understand performance. It is important to understand, optimize and align operational activities and processes to a common set of objectives, which requires a comprehensive solution that provides both historical context and trend analyses.
Operational excellence is more effectively driven when employees have access to real-time information that precisely identifies and helps to resolve mission-critical business issues as they happen. As such, there is a need for a consolidated view of the complex, interdependent systems, resources and processes that are involved in running the contact center or customer service division. With access to such processes and information, employees can compare their performance against peers and corporate strategies to identify opportunities for improvement.
Operational performance management solutions provide the meaningful, actionable business intelligence that includes a true enterprise view and the performance of individual agents. With an effective operational performance management solution in place, the organization can stop problems before they start by making use of current resources; identify those agents who are customer-facing stars and which ones may need some guidance; proactively solve problems instead of addressing the same issue over and over; document the actions taken when a problem occurs and evaluate the success of those actions; and gain the ability to change along with business conditions.
It is important to note that employees need to feel like they are a part of the team – one that is working together toward a common goal. Employees who are able to visualize their performance and compare it against benchmarks and peers are better equipped to make the necessary changes or receive the necessary training to improve. With that improvement, a better overall experience is created in every customer interaction for that employee. And, when an employee is able to measure his or her own improvements, the internal rewards are substantial.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Erin Harrison
