What is the best way to compensate and measure employee performance as it relates to saving customers in a call center environment?
I'm in the telecom industry and would like to put greater emphasis on situations where customers are saved from going to the competition. My current save rate measures the percentage of customers who disconnect service, the inverse being retention, but this number is clouded by uncontrollable customer losses (moving out of region, etc.) and misdirected calls. With an improved measure I can better reward and coach employees.
Answers (5)
Michael L
Innovative, Entrepreneurial, Leadership malebrun@gmail.com
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Hi Dan:
God bless you for your work in a telecom call center. I've been around enough of them (praised and cursed them) to know that this is inherently a tough job and motivation and measurement is the hardest of all.
You are dead on with your evaluation of measuring the retention rate. Some disconnects are simply beyond anyone's control, no matter how silver-tongued they may be. The only way you can truly monitor a single rep in this instance is by monitoring the call (and I know it is impossible to monitor every save situation).
I am guessing that your auto prompt steers discos to the save group and not to the general call center reps (except when calls waiting push this). Now then, do you (or can you) measure and develop a metric (the average) or all disco calls that hit the group that actually disco? Then, it would seem that you might be able to comp the group for beating the average. As for individuals, I think you might be able to discern their performance by the number of calls handled and see how they do against the group average (in other words, I handled 100 calls and saved 15. The group average is 10%. I beat the group average). Then rank the folks above (and maybe, below) the group average. They become your heroes and they can help the others improve their average.
Realizing that motivation in the center is critical, I think I would trumpet the group's accomplishment (by beating the average) more than the individual.
Hope this helps. With a decade and a half of telecom, let me know if I can help further. Good luck at Qwest.
Michael
An effective tool for measuring this is exit surveys. Make sure they are very short (at most 5 questions) with the possibility of writing out additional information if they would like. Your response rate will not be 100%, but you will be able to gather great information on reasons for leaving.
If your pool is large enough, you should have percentages to work from when looking at bonuses and other compensations.
Good luck!
Jason Moore
Dan,
What you are looking for is measuring customer satisfaction. As Michael indicated I would set up a group to manage the disconnects not related to moving out of the region. This group would be trained to manage the customer an convince them to stay with your service. This would also give you the information to drive back in to the organization to effect changes not related to the call center service.
First I would train and sensitize the whole call center to be aware of disconnects, or potential disconnects. Every agent should be tuned into each customer and concerned about their retention.
Compensation should be shared by all who participate. Do not isolate the disconnect group from the remainder of the call center. This creates ill feelings. I would reward the agent in the call center as well as the agent who turned around the customer. I would put the money in a pool and share equally. I would reward based on an increase in retention rates established ahead of time to give people goals.
The issue you face is agents transferring customers that were not really disconnects, or potential disconnects. You will have to police this area, as some agents may take advantage of the program.
I hope this helps.
bill
Ajay M
Senior Manager - Branch Head
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+ Eliminate the queues and hold time to automatically generate good customer feedback.
+ Employees must provide prompt responses with satisfactory solutions each time, every time. Resources and information must be made available at fingertips. Inculcate in training itself.
+ Have a quality testing team to monitor all call transactions and provide feedback on a weekly basis for all employees. Repeated deviations need to be escalated and corrected.
+ Customer feedback surveys conducted by a separate task force to generate and register VOC (Voice of the Customer) feedback for the previous call transaction within a D+2 time frame scenario (where D = Today) for each customer called.
+ Provide sufficient manpower to distribute work load effectively and balance the load.
+ Conduct quarterly appraisals and refresher training programmes with tests, record the scores and performance of all employees. Consistently good scores / performance indicates employee productivity and effectiveness.
+ Measure repeat calls ratio (RCR), where customers had to call back to recheck on the 'same' information or weren't satisfied with the previous explanations / support from the earlier call, RCR > 02 % of total calls per employee per quarterly basis analysis.
Hi Dan,
Do your ragents use save offers and when applied are the save offers trackable by your system ?
Hind
Clarification added 11 months ago:
and are all your deactivations calls concentrated in a dedicated queue?
Sorry to answer a question by 2 Qs but this will help...tx
