Employee performance management

Twenty-six percent of customers have lost their temper during a customer service interaction. The right tools will give you the flexibility needed for the performance management to help eliminate these uncomfortable situations.

These include call interaction recording, quality monitoring, gamification and coaching. As you put your process in place, employees must be clear on what you’re measuring and why, and be confident they have the tools to succeed. Set out clear expectations with metrics, cultivate their successes with praise and recognition — and hold them accountable through proactive engagement.

Also, it’s important to provide agents with a means to understand their personal development goals and skills gaps so they can take ownership of their own training and growth. That helps increase agent engagement, which helps you retain high performers and increase the performance of all agents.

Engage virtual employees with frequent, regularly scheduled team meetings and one-on-one meetings. Setting a regular time and sticking to it shows you value your human resources and your mutual engagement. The most effective one-on-one meetings are geared to help the person develop and improve.

Use the time to share goals, details on what you want them to achieve and deadlines for meeting these goals. It’s a good time to see what the employee is interested in, such as taking on more responsibility in a particular area, so that you’re aware and can follow up with any appropriate opportunities. Perhaps most importantly, building trust requires sincerity, commitment and a genuine interest in the welfare of your employees. Model openness and transparency and you’ll get the same in return.

Start with fair pay at current market rates. The labor market has tightened, giving call center agents more employment options, often with higher pay. Fair pay not only motivates, it reduces attrition.

On a personal level, take time to acknowledge the job they do and how they contribute to your success. Do this publicly in team meetings and privately, especially during performance reviews. And don’t forget the “fun factor.” Build gamification into your processes and get their input on what they like about it.

When you listen to agents’ input — about customers, job preferences, training and development and more — it’s a sign of respect. They’ll know they’re being heard and appreciated not just as employees, but as humans.

By facilitating ongoing and open communication, performance management plays a major role in employee development. When you identify goals and set achievable expectations, your team members can respond — and stay aligned with key business objectives. But those individual goals should also include a longer-term path for their development. Once an employee achieves a goal, they need to understand they’re now ready to move on to the next level, and what that requires.

Additionally, supervisors and agents should have the same visibility into the same real-time performance metrics for the agent. Employees want transparency, and they need to know that their supervisors see the same things they do so they can have accurate and targeted development plans. This transparency also fosters collaboration and trust between agent and supervisor — rather than reviews catching an agent off-guard, they have the ability to know exactly how they’re doing at any moment, and can work with their supervisor to improve.

Using performance management software equips them to continue their development by taking the best next steps. And because managers also nurture development through a mix of coaching, guidance and counseling, effective performance management tools are essential for complete transparency. Finally, be sure you’re measuring outcomes in a way that maps to employee development. They need to know processes and goals but also specific areas for improvement as milestones for development.

Take the time needed to get to know employees and stay engaged with them. Employees want to be successful, so be sure to provide recognition when they do succeed. Be sure to assist them in reaching their short- and long-term goals. This can be done via ongoing coaching by the manager or other successful team members.

For example, if an employee misses average handle time (AHT) goals, arrange for them to shadow the agent who has the best call control or AHT on the team. Don’t wait to deliver feedback at annual reviews. As much as possible, provide real-time feedback and focus on how the feedback serves overall goals rather than one bad day of non-adherence. After all, some goals are meant to be measured over a longer period of time; one day shouldn’t be the focus of performance improvement.

Beyond the technical challenges, which are relatively easy to handle with help from your software provider, there are other things to look out for. The main ones are resistance to change, and buy-in to the new process.

Change is tough for anyone, and change at work can be particularly frightening. Employees need to know that the new performance management software is a tool to help them, not a weapon to be used against them. Showing managers and employees alike how the new software can help make their jobs easier will help to increase buy-in, turning people who may have been initially reluctant into enthusiastic adopters of the new performance management solution.

A continuous feedback approach improves employee performance management in a few ways. First, it means that managers don’t have to wait for an annual or quarterly review process to provide feedback — employees always know where they stand. Because of this, an added benefit is that employees can always be working to improve by leveraging the things they’re doing well and working on the things they aren’t.

An employee performance management system helps contribute to your organization’s success because better performance management means better employees. You can focus on improving the performance of the employees you already have, rather than trying to replace them with better-performing employees. This improves retention and relieves the stress of your hiring department.

Better employees get more done, and do it better. And since they’ve invested in their own improvement, that helps turn what may have been a job into a career — meaning employee loyalty and satisfaction increase as well, helping to turn improvement into a self-perpetuating cycle.

Agents are using more different tools than ever, and there’s more data to parse for supervisors. But if that data isn’t all accessible, there could be opportunities for growth that are missed. Because of this, integrations and connectivity are critical.

Look for a native employee performance management solution that’s native to your overall platform, and that can connect with things like quality management, conversational insights, average handle time, routing and more. This allows for more effective coaching decisions based on personal development needs, increasing productivity and driving continuous improvement for agents — and, therefore, the customer experience.