Customer Experience Management Solutions and Consultants

 The Problem

First line supervisors are the most critical factor in the performance, satisfaction and retention of staff.  Yet as organisations have become leaner the amount of time they can spend coaching and developing their staff becomes less.  In a 2006 McKinsey Quarterly article⁽¹⁾ the authors showed that, for a sample of banks, increasing the time the supervisors spent coaching from 20% to 40% resulted in a seven-fold increase in sales conversion rates.

But the problem isn't just quantity of coaching it is quality.  There needs to be enough coaching going on, and it needs to be effective.  Four things are often missing

• Coaches don't have enough time. They need to spend most of their time on administration, collation of statistics, reporting and compliance which leaves them very little time for active management and coaching
  
• Coaches don't know where to focus their efforts. Objective data on  a balanced view of the performance of each of their team members is difficult to obtain and understand.
• Coaches don't know what to coach.  They find it hard to identify the practices being applied by their best  people so that they can transfer the techniques to others via the coaching process
• Coaches don't have the 'soft' skills to engage in coaching style discussions.  Skills such as active listening, assertive questioning and negotiation are not well developed.

The Solution

The LimeBridge solution has three elements that address all of these areas.

• The Merced Performance Suite
• Best Practice Development
  
• Supervisor and Team Leader Skills Development
  

When applied in an integrated way, they can typically deliver 10-15% performance improvements within 6 months and 25-30% over 12 -18 month period.

The Merced Performance Suite:  Contact Centre Reporting and Performance Management Toolset 

The Merced Performance Suite is a 100% web based application that automates collecting, sorting, reconciling and reporting on performance data from all the various sources in your contact centre.  It's task is to eliminate the work supervisors need to  do gather, collate and report on the performance of their teams.  It also helps them to understand where to focus their coaching activities and facilitates record keeping.

The Merced Performance Suite provides tools that make sense of the information and help your people to take the right action consistently. It will tell you who your best people are and help you recruit more like them. It provides everyone in your organization with personalized performance scorecards and its integrated alerts and workflows get everyone acting on that data consistently.

With inbuilt domain expertise to handle the complexities of contact centre operations such as agents moving between teams and specialised and complex data sources, it also significantly reduces the Total Cost of Ownership over reporting systems built using traditional BI tools.

Supervisor and Team Leader Skills Development

Improving the effectiveness of team leaders is one of the most powerful levers you can use to improve centre performance.  We work with your team leaders and managers through a series of training workshops to teach them how to be effective performance coaches. Typical areas we cover are:

• Active listening
• Negotiation
• Coaching and Feedback Models
• Confrontation Models
• Call Centre Dynamics
• Fact based management

But skills development doesn't stop at the end of the workshops.  We work side by side with your people in the workplace, coaching and mentoring them on how to be effective coaches and performance managers.

Best Practice Development

In any centre some agents perform better than others and have developed techniques for handling various types of calls.  By working with them we help you identify both 'internal' and external best practices that we then help you disseminate across all your people.

⁽¹⁾ "Using Contact Centres to Boost Revenue" The McKinsey Quarterly Web Edition May 2006