In consumer marketing research there are 4 P’s, with the first “P” being People.  Marketers segment consumers by income, geography, gender, age, etc. in order to prescribe the right “treatment” or create the right message to the population.  We are now taking that same segmentation concept and applying it to employee development. 

All employees are not created equal.  We suggest that team leaders and managers segment their employees and then target each segment specifically to get the most from that population.  Segmentation will help the team leaders and managers determine how much time they should spend in meetings, coaching and training with each segment.  Since their time is always tight, we want to make sure we can maximize the benefit team leaders deliver while minimizing time constraints. 

What does employee segmentation mean?  Segmentation is just a way to divide up the team based on performance.  The team can be divided in to:

• Quadrants
• Stack Ranked
• Outliers
• Statistical or Mean-based
• Or divided up manually by the team leader

Not all segments need to be equal in size, as not all segments will need the same coaching or meeting time from the team leader.  For example, I can easily divide a team in to four categories:

• Top Performers
• Solid Performers
• Weak Performers
• Bottom Performers

Depending on the priorities of your business, whether in Sales, Productivity, or Customer Experience, the best way to start employee segmentation is to select one key metric or a balanced score to stack rank the employees; use a metric that is well aligned to your business initiatives.  From there you can decide how to divide up the population, keeping in mind this division will also dictate the team leader’s meeting, coaching and training time for each population group.  Employee segmentation can also address some of the common questions you answer in your organization today, such as, “Who are your top performers, who are your bottom performers, who is struggling?”

For a typical team leader in a Call Center, their team of 21 agents might look something like the graph below:

From the segmentation above, I can easily see I have:
3 Bottom Performers
5 Weak Performers
10 Solid Performers
3 Top Performers

Where would a team leader in your organization likely spend their management and coaching time? Do they get the results your company needs from the current time management decisions (or ‘formula’)?

What we do with these Employee Segments will be covered in my next post – "Where do Team Leaders spend most of their time?"

This entry is the last of a series of entries on the topic of  “What Performance Metrics are Right for my Business?” In previous posts I discussed the first and second tiers of the return on investment from performance management. In this post I’d like to introduce the 3rd tier: Contribute Back.

The final and hardest tier to accomplish is the ability for an organisation to exploit the huge wealth of information in the contact centre to drive product development, give visibility to impending marketing issues such as declining publicity, inform legal of emerging issues and provide insight into changing customer expectations. This requires high levels of expertise within the frontline to extract and capture this information in a way that it can be distributed and reported on by other departments. In addition it now becomes crucial that your workforce morale is high and that your employees are exhibiting proactive and positive behaviours. There are direct and proven correlations between employee morale and customer satisfaction and loyalty.

When measuring knowledge and expertise within your employees a good way is to break your knowledge and coaching into segments or “steps” in order that you can identify when an agent has completed a knowledge segment and is ready to move to a more demanding and complex learning goal. Measuring how many agents are able to transition between these segments can give you a clear idea as to where in the business your experts are. Some of the metrics for this tier would be:

 1. What level of coaching are my agents attaining? Who are my experts?
           Metric: Coaching Attainment Segmentation
 2. What is my employee morale?
           Metric: Employee Satisfaction
 3. Are we capturing the right information at each interaction?
           Metric: Data Quality  4. Where are your interactions most successful and most cost effective
          Metric: Resolution Rate by Channel (Web, Contact Center, Face to Face)
 5. Which interactions are most cost effective and successful?
          Metric: Cost to Resolve by Channel
  
These are some of the "Holy Grail" metrics that enable a business to take full advantage of thier largest customer facing "surface areas" and enable customer satisfaction to be truly met while keeping costs under control.

I look forward to your feedback

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Author: James Burr

James Burr is the Business Consulting Manager with Merced Systems. He has over 7 years experience implementing Sales Performance Management systems in a broad range of industries including Telco, Finance and Automotive. He can be reached at james.burr@mercedsystems.com 

So the World Cup has come and gone for another four years and all the pundits have analysed it to death. Everyone says the best team won and they were always the favourites, so it ran to plan. One thing that does stick out loud and clear though is that apart from the winners it very much didn’t run to plan for any other team.

All the ‘big’ teams went out earlier than anticipated, some badly. Less established and fancied teams did substantially better. Why? and what comparisons can we draw?

If you condense all the punditry right down, each team brought three factors to the party, rather like a company brings a strategy to the market.  Management,  Ability,  Game Plan.

Those that did well blended these three factors and executed against them superbly.  They understood their competitive advantages and made full use of them.

We can all see how England, France and Italy failed against several of these factors, whilst Brazil and Argentina just simply failed to execute. ‘Surprise’ teams such as Uruguay, Paraguay, Holland, even Germany had all these factors and executed well.

So what about in the performance management world?

 
Can you manage your resources well?

Smart, nimble teams, properly motivated can beat much bigger competition, just look at Holland. 

The goals aren't always scored by the players with the biggest pay checks, proving that incentives are important but they’re not the only way to motivate behavior and drive results.  Coaching, team support and competitive comparison drives strong performance.

What about the ability of your team and its individuals?

Who are your best team members and do they know who they are?  Find the metrics that matter and make them count.

What's your game plan ?

Are your team able to play according to the plan or do the processes and systems unempower them? Just how agile are you to adjust your plan mid-game?

Can you execute well? 

With the right performance management on the team helping you drive your competitive advantages you can.

The best team won, it wasn’t a fluke. Have you got the winning team?

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Author: Suzanne Congdon

Suzanne Congdon is EMEA Marketing Manager with Merced Systems.  Suzanne has over 15 years experience working for enterprise software providers delivering solutions and services to the contact centre industry and can be contacted at suzanne.congdon@mercedsystems.com

This entry is part two of three on the topic of “How to drive End User Adoption & Success with your brand new Performance Management Solution?” In my previous post, I introduced the first of seven essentials for adoption success which states that the System will be accepted by users if it promotes the “What’s in it for me?” Today, I will introduce essentials 2-4:

2. The system will be accepted if you explain to me why it is important? Once again, make it simple & tell me “What’s in it for me?  Translate for me how it helps me achieve my goals?
Communication is highly underrated, and often poorly executed! Be organized, plan methodically & clearly determine who is the audience, what kind of communication is needed to them about this solution, what should the vehicle of this communication be, when should it go out to them?  The more informed I have about the new system, the more personalized the message is to me, the more I feel part of the process, the more likely I am to use the system!

3. If I am thoroughly educated on the solution, I am more likely to use it in the way you intended for me to use it!
Yes I want to be trained on the product, but I also want to be trained on the concept of Performance Management. The system is vehicle for Performance Management, but if I don’t understand what Performance Management really means, to me, in my world, how am I supposed to apply it, via this system to appropriately to drive results?  Training around not just the ‘How’ but also the ‘What’ will make me a well educated, effective user! 

4. If it is not an additional burden in my day – I am more likely to use it! Weave the usage of the system, and adherence of performance management into my daily fabric. Help me create daily rituals that this solution is part and parcel of. Help make performance management a ‘mindset’ not an extra process: where this is THE way I conduct myself and where system references become part of my daily language! It becomes our culture!

Read my next entry when I share Essentials 5 – 7.

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Author: Aparna Fernandes

Aparna Fernandes is Sr. Director, Customer Success with Merced Systems.  She has more than a decade of experience in fields of performance management, reporting, and strategic planning across various industries, with key focus on developing models for sustained success & business impact with SSPM solutions. She can be reached at aparna.fernandes@mercedsystems.com.

This entry is a continuation of my previous post: What Performance Metrics are Right for my Business? (Part Two of Four).  In my previous post I discussed how the first tier of the return on investment from performance management is improved efficiency. In this post I’d like to introduce the 2nd tier: Focus on your Customers.

Now that you have the foundations in place and have started the process of enabling managers to become effective coaches you can start to introduce metrics that focus more on the customer interactions.

The metrics on this tier are more complex to capture and will often involve combining information from multiple departments and channels.


        1. Can you resolve the Customer requirement on the first interaction?

             Metric: FCR or Right First Time

        2. How do the Customers rate your service?

              Metric: Customer Satisfaction (Surveys, Complaints, Door to Door)

        3. How much does it cost to resolve the customer requirement?

              Metric: Cost per Call Resolution

The key to getting the most benefit in this tier is understanding the balance between the Cost Per Call and resolving the customers requirement. Moving to First Call Resolution should include an understanding of the current costs involved in resolving each customer interaction. Customer surveys should be in the context of the product and department being discussed and should be linked back to the original employee.


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Author: James Burr

James Burr is the Business Consulting Manager with Merced Systems. He has over 7 years experience implementing Sales Performance Management systems in a broad range of industries including Telco, Finance and Automotive. He can be reached at james.burr@mercedsystems.com 

So, you’ve rolled out a performance management system but after an initial spike, usage starts to drop and productivity is not improving.  You wonder, why?
Has System Adoption been an afterthought?
Myth – “I can start to think about system adoption once I have launched my system!” 

This kind of thinking is akin to swinging too late at a fastball you knew was coming. Time it right and you can hit a homerun!

ROI impact will automatically come once I have launched the new tool?
….Only if the launch has been successful in making this system & Performance Management part of your daily DNA – not ‘that extra thing’ to do.

How to make a system “a solution”?
It is as much science as it is art. It is a science, because of the straightforward logical thought process that can be applied in this space; it is an art because it involves people and important words like culture transformation! 

So where do you start?  Start with the end in mind! -  Plan your Launch with End-User Adoption in mind.
7 Essentials for Success…..
1. The System will be accepted by users if it promotes the “What’s in it for me?”
The new system content needs to be relevant, accurate and complete.  If it includes Key performance indicators users are incentivized/ paid on, they are more likely to go there and use it. If the data is reliable and trustworthy, they are also likely to go there.  And if it has everything important in one place, they are even more likely to go there. 

Finally, if you take away all other alternate sources of the same data/content – they will surely go there! I know a friend who once turned down the most prime location for her coffee shop business because they would not guarantee her the “non-compete” clause in her contract. In other words, they would allow a competitive coffee shop to exist right next to her business in the same strip mall. Odds are her user base would be split in half before she even had a chance! I think you get the point….

Read my next entry when I share Essentials 2 – 4.

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Author: Aparna Fernandes
Aparna Fernandes is Sr. Director, Customer Success with Merced Systems.  She has more than a decade of experience in fields of performance management, reporting, and strategic planning across various industries, with key focus on developing models for sustained success & business impact with SSPM solutions. She can be reached at aparna.fernandes@mercedsystems.com.

Incentive Compensation Management in Sales Operations can be the strangest of corporate beasts.  Sure, it’s a cold, hard, financial problem, but it’s a soft, squishy, psychological one too.  You are using money or other rewards as a lever to try to modify the behavior of your sales people, but the lever isn’t applied directly to the behavior.  At best, you pay on the outcomes of the behaviors after the revenue recognition process and the comp plan terms and conditions have been applied.

What this distinction can lead to is the need to make exceptions to the rules when the right behaviors haven’t led to the right results.

The most obvious example of this is when the economy crashes and burns.  The collapse of the Asian economy in the late ‘90s caused comp plans to be rewritten, quotas to be slashed, and drastic measures like guaranteed incentive payments to be slammed into place to keep the sales force alive and selling through the downturn.  In this kind of situation it’s critical to do what’s “right” rather than what the comp plan says.  Your sales guys didn’t cause the economic crisis, so holding them to the terms of the plan causes financial hardship to the people who made you successful the year before.  You have to do what you can to keep your best reps productive until the economy comes back.

A more localized example is when Rep A lends an active hand on Rep B’s deal.  The deal falls in Rep B’s sales territory, but you should absolutely give some credit (and commissions) for the deal to Rep A for the help given in landing the customer.

Okay, we all get it – ICM systems must support some level of exception-based payments.  But the word “some” is important here.  I’m reminded of a Comp Manager who told me that her company’s monthly process was to calculate commissions, print a report, and carry it to the VP of Sales.  The VP would cross out the numbers and write in the amounts he felt like paying each rep.  And that’s how much they paid.

I laughed.  She didn’t.  She was serious – that was their comp process.  And that’s just insane.  Random amounts of money showing up on the commission check each month do nothing to drive good selling behaviors.  We’ve all seen comp plans with conditions like “if it’s Tuesday and a red car passes, pay an extra 25% unless we decide not to”.  Do the reps really know how to behave with a plan like that?  And we’ve all seen the situation where any sales rep who whines loudly enough gets to go to President’s Club, even when they haven’t earned the trip.  That trip doesn’t do anything to make your company successful either.

The takeaway is that some exceptions to the rules must be made to keep the company on the right track.  But some exceptions do nothing positive for the company, and sometimes can be insidiously harmful to the company’s long-term success.  The comp admins know the difference, but often don’t have the authority to stop the harmful exceptions.  It’s a top-down activity to make your compensation plan exceptions work for your company, not against it.

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Author: David Kelly

David Kelly is an ICM Solutions Architect with Merced Systems.  He has more than a decade of experience in translating ICM business requirements into maintainable, high-performing systems for many companies across various industries.  He can be reached at david.kelly@mercedsystems.com.

Today I will build on my previous post: What Performance Metrics are Right for my Business? (Part One of Four). 
We've seen that when looking at an organisation and the return on investment in Performance Management there are typically 3 tiers that a company will transition through. In this post I’d like to discuss the 1st tier: Improving Efficiency.

In the first tier the focus is on improving the efficiency of your employees by removing common barriers to their day to day activities and freeing up time to focus on your customers and receive the coaching they require to improve their own performance. Managers are the key to this improvement and understanding whether they are putting time into improving employee performance or instead are spending that time on reporting, data capture or dispute management. When choosing metrics and KPI's to measure performance in this tier it is imperative you give yourself a clear understanding of the following:
 
 1. How much is every contact with the customer costing you?   Metric: Cost Per Contact
 2. How much time are your managers spending coaching?   Metric: Coaching Time
 3. How often do your managers coach your frontline staff?   Metric: Coaching Cadence
 4. Can you identify whether employees are using best practice in their calls?
  Metric: Quality Management (Call Monitoring)

Getting the basic coaching principles right in this tier is crucial and your reporting should be geared towards measuring the correlation between coaching and performance, for example does AHT (employee metric) reduce when Coaching Cadence (manager metric) increases?

In my next post, I will discuss tier 2: Focusing on your customers.

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Author: James Burr

James Burr is the Business Consulting Manager with Merced Systems. He has over 7 years experience implementing Sales Performance Management systems in a broad range of industries including Telco, Finance and Automotive. He can be reached at james.burr@mercedsystems.com 

When looking at Performance Management, a question that gets asked a lot is "What metrics should my company be using to measure performance". The answer given is often a convoluted one involving many caveats, "ifs" and "buts". In this entry, I want to present a different take on how to tell if a metric is meaningful to your organisation and some suggestions for getting the most out of the metrics you already have. This will be part one of a four part series.

The first question to look at is "What is Performance Management" and perhaps the best way to answer this is to look at the answers to two other questions: "What do you expect of your employees?" and "What do your customers expect of you?” The cornerstone of Performance Management lies in exceeding your customers’ expectations during every interaction that they have with your company. Your contact centres and frontline employees are at the heart of this strategy. Performance Management can be defined as: the process of ensuring all levels of your organisation have accurate and timely visibility into the metrics that define your strategy and have the tools available to improve their performance. It's clear that for your company to be successful and meet the two goals of exceeding customer expectations and improving the performance of your employees, your metrics have to reflect where you are as a company. There is no point diving straight to complex KPI's if you haven't laid the foundation stones in your performance management strategy.

When looking at an organisation and the return on investment in Performance Management there are typically 3 tiers that a company will transition through, gaining further benefits at each tier. The tiers are:

1.      Improving Efficiency

2.      Focusing on your Customers

3.      Contributing back to the organization 

The key is to figure out how your company ranks against this structure. In the next couple of weeks, I will delve into each one of these tiers and discuss how to choose metrics and KPIs to measure performance in each tier.

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Author: James Burr

James Burr is the Business Consulting Manager with Merced Systems. He has over 7 years experience implementing Sales Performance Management systems in a broad range of industries including Telco, Finance and Automotive. He can be reached at james.burr@mercedsystems.com

Imagine, if you will, a large corporation consisting of multiple business units that are both home-grown and the result of mergers and acquisitions, all glommed together with integrated systems, policies, procedures, and cultures.  Each of these business units produces disparate but hopefully complimentary products or services that the sales reps from each of the business units must then sell.  Sometimes the metrics to which each rep works and for which they are compensated are the same, sometimes they are different, and sometimes they look the same but are measured differently.  Not that a company like this really exists outside of our imaginations, but let’s pretend it does…

So let’s ask ourselves the question:  What would a successful Incentive Compensation Management system deployment look like for this hypothetical company?

As it is so often the case, the answer is:  It depends.  It might be the big-bang enterprise-wide system replacement integrated with a thoughtfully designed data warehouse to bring all sales compensation together under one umbrella.  It might be the surgical removal of a single set of spreadsheets for one business unit, replacing them with an auditable and scalable system to mitigate one set of risks that has the CFO lying awake at night.  Or it might be something in between – maybe rationalizing comp plans and processes for the pair of business units with the highest incidence of accuracy issues.

Project success is what you decide it needs to be.  And what you plan for it to be.  And what you communicate it to be.  These last two points are critical.  Buying software and some consulting hours from a vendor are a fine start, of course.  But there’s more.  You’ll need to build a project team on your side as well, and they need to know exactly what success looks like too.

It sounds self-evident, but it’s all-too-common that the team on the ground hasn’t been given the vision.  Given no guidance, they do the safest thing – they implement the current broken state of the world in new software.  If process and system rationalization is what represents success to you, this project has to be judged as a failure.

How do you prevent this?  Taking an active leadership role on the project Steering Committee is a good place to begin.  When requirements gathering turns into a perfect storm of exceptions based on bad data meeting bad processes, someone who owns the vision of why the implementation project is taking place at all can step in and say, “That’s how we used to do it, but the new system won’t be set up that way in the future.”

Future blog entries will address communication and expectation setting, internally and externally, to assure that ICM project success – on your terms – is both achievable and achieved.

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Author: David Kelly

David Kelly is an ICM Solutions Architect with Merced Systems.  He has more than a decade of experience in translating ICM business requirements into maintainable, high-performing systems for many companies across various industries.  He can be reached at david.kelly@mercedsystems.com.