Any good manager knows that it does not take hundreds of reports to run his business.
But it does take the right ones.
And these key reports need to evolve with the company.
Fundamentally, there are 2 kinds of reports a business benefits from:
Any good manager knows that it does not take hundreds of reports to run his business.
But it does take the right ones.
And these key reports need to evolve with the company.
Fundamentally, there are 2 kinds of reports a business benefits from:
Most of us are satisfied with the performance reports that we are using.
Our operations are running relatively smooth.
We achieve our goals month after month and year after year.
We even manage to improve quality and productivity.
Our employees are happy to work for us and our customers remain loyal year after year.
What else could you want? Why would you want to “mess with success”?
It seems most leaders have struggled with these goals many times in their careers.
Employees hear “decrease quality” when they hear the boss ask for increased productivity.
Many leaders asking for better quality are afraid to decrease productivity.
I have witnessed many companies where employees became the de facto “defenders” of quality and the leaders the defenders of productivity.
Not a very encouraging place to be.
Productivity and quality is not a unique challenge to call centers, but the two values have a particular make-up in the contact centers.
ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) systems provide easy access to productivity metrics.
Furthermore, easily accessible metrics makes productivity the more objective of the two measurements.
Objectivity is still possible with quality standards but remains a little more demanding to define than productivity standards.
To avoid creating this elusive dichotomy within your contact center, here are a few suggestions:
The Good:
Statistics are an integral part of any business.
They are superb when you want to understand your market and your performance.
They are invaluable when you have no way of knowing the future outcome of a given situation.
They help us make predictions through simple or complex analysis of historical data.
They allow us to calculate probabilities.
They enable us to make decisions in the absence of information.
With the right reporting tools its likely you will reveal areas of improvements unbeknownst to you.
The Bad:
To paraphrase the words of the late Stephen Covey, the balance is in the ‘AND’ not the ‘OR’.
Therefore, when it comes to real-time or historical management, both are definitely crucial for anyone in a leadership role.
They each have a specific place in our management acumen.
By “real-time” I mean that observations and perhaps even decisions are made from information drawn from the current day’s recent hourly data.
Many of us have experienced the frustration of not knowing how to get some of our employees to perform according to our expectations.
In our hustle and bustle day-to-day bump and grind we may even miss the obvious signs.
Here are 3 fundamental reasons why employees do not perform:
If you have been working in call centers for a while doubtless you have heard it said years ago that the standard goal for service level was 80% calls answered in 20 seconds.
Nowadays businesses recognize that you can’t pigeonhole everyone with the same goal.
The goals must derive from the nature of your business and your market and what arsenal you choose to position yourself as a leader in your field.
Everyone knows that to run an efficient call center you focus on the time it takes for agents to handle calls.
Everyone is also painstakingly aware of the disadvantages of focusing too much on this indicator.
Some experts and some companies have decided not to consider this factor at all using the argument that the cost and ramifications of managing handling time far outweighs its benefits.
It’s always better when you can hire new employees with the amount of experience you require.
But this is not always as easy as it seems.
Usually your competitors are also out there scourging the terrain which creates a higher demand on an already short supply.
There are some things you may be able to do to mitigate this challenge.
As you already know, whatever industry you are involved in, you and your competitors experience the same ebb and flows of that market which in turn influence your decision-making.
Perhaps, you could adjust your recruiting timeframes and start sooner to avoid the “peak” in the demand from the industry.
However, that may be too costly.
For any of us who run a call center it is easy to lose sight of an important fact.
Yet this fact literally means the difference between a great brand and a dud.
We can spend millions of dollars on a great ad campaign and still end up short of establishing a great brand if we have lost sight of this critical success factor.