Not all the glitters, is gold, and so is true in a call center. Most performance management and incentive programs focus heavily on the financial or monetary benefits to help incentivize agent performance. But, in a black belt project, you focus on ways to drive down costs, so I ask you, can it be done?

The answer is YES! Especially, in your offshore and outsourced operation centers. If you have every traveled to meet your teams overseas, you will find a wonderful group of self-motivated and driven individuals who want to exceed at running your account, to the contrary the popular belief system that agents are always looking to cut corners, 'game the system' or do whatever they can to get off of the phone. While the latter may hold the most "somewhat truth", the real opportunity lies in the environment that they work. Take a look around the center and ask yourself a few critical questions -- Do you see a lot of recognition on the walls, i.e. portraits of high performing agents? Do you hear about a lot of motivational events, like 'Agent Appreciation Week' or 'XXX Food Cookoff Competition' or any SWAG give away in which the agents can win logo prizes? What managers who have preconceived notions may scoff at (bad black belt if you are scoffing at any improvement effort without first analyzing the data -- but shush, I won't tell)

Most performance lies within the agent; it starts with tenure and moves into morale as they become more seasoned. Don't worry if you have just received a six sigma project related to improving agent performance without raising salaries because softer things like I mentioned above, do make a difference. You will just need to set up interviews with agents to prove so. I suggest stratifying your data by the following three dimensions: a) tenure, b) current performance (high performer, low performer or average) and lastly c)agent name (for identification purposes). Your output should be agent satisfaction scores (C-Sat surveys given to customer based on their experience with an agent during a call or email) but if it AHT, that is fine, except I would break it down into the components of AHT (see previous post) since AHT by definition is an AVERAGE. Lastly, overlay all of this using the Matrix Plot graphing option in Minitab to view interactions between each input dimension and output. Then, interview those that fall into the following buckets - newbie, high performer vs. oldie, high performer; newbie, low performer vs. oldie, low performer and compare drivers. You should ask questions that really get them thinking and make sure you set up a "safe environment"; i.e. one that is off of the floor, possibly in a conference room, so they feel free to answer honestly. Reassure them that their answers are anonymous and for research purposes only and really try to relate on their level before launching into your questions. Like I said before...Not all that glitters, is gold and such is true with what will drive your human performance related six sigma projects.

flowergirldujour.blogspot.com


--> check it out for the latest in my life sagas...

Laura's Case Study on how scorecards can help organizations with their PM; moving away from reports and spreadsheets in order to answer the "WHYs"...

http://download.microsoft.com/documents/customerevidence/22483_Expedia_Case_Study.doc http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/d/f/cdfa926a-d3af-4120-89fb-7c3bbac5c771/Technical_value.ppt

Laura Was Published in eWeek!

www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1877881,00.asp - 73k

Laura Was Published in InformationWeek!

http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=188703431

Laura Was Published in TDWI:

http://www.tdwi.org/news/display.aspx?id=8233

Scorecards Anonymous in a Web 2.0 world...?
Recently, I was asked to comment on what I thought about Web 2.0 -- that's like asking what my opinion is on internet surfing or white rice...plain, generic and filled with subliminal ignorance of one trying to sound informed yet missing the point by a long shot. In order to understand my thoughts on Web 2.0, one needs to hone in on what specific aspect -- the user-generated content is quite different than user-friendly and helpful widgits which is equally as different from user-generated pages --- or wait...is it all that different...?

If you ask some, they will passionately argue for the new benefits that 2.0 will offer the end user...If you ask others, they won't have the first clue what you are talking about, thinking Web 2.0 is some new software program that Microsoft has just released. And if you ask others, they might claim to be the all knowing source of information on the subject, say, a Maven (with kudos to the 'Tipping Point' author Malcolm Gladwell) wanna-be, who, at the risk of sounding daft to others around them, a surpremely driving force in their lives, that is, looking intelligent to others in all topics rather than honing their skills on just one, might respond that Web 2.0 neither merits the accolades of the truely knowing nor warrants the staunch defense of the nonsensical-ness of offering users the ability to upload home movies a.l.a. 'America's Funniest Home Videos' or personal feelings through diary blogging a.l.a. 'Sex and the City' meets 'Girls Gone Wild'.

In the end, what I am writing and what you are now reading, is, in its most pure form, a type of web 2.0 offering, the self-branded, scorecard-focused, self-generated content which aims at both delivering a high-value information store to other scorecard-ers world-wide, as well as provides a platform by which, as Tom Peters would credit, yields its author, me, an opportunity to brand themselves as a topic Maven...All of this, before the Internet of the future blows up and into proportion, where Interent searches are intuitive and frustration levels are low; where content seems to "auto-magically" be pulled for you based on your preference requirements and finally, pushed out to you, with one crucial differances than what you might say is the way it is done today...the key...le clef...on demand, rather than statically rendering the same set of content rendered to all users of that Internet page. Not customized at all to your liking / preferences. Nothing is easy...everything has a price...can scorecards be set up as intuitively, say, as a widget on an existing page...? something users can drag and drop at will...? the future is near and it is bright...check out MS PreformancePoint 2007...not quite there, but close.