There are five myths that encourage these mistakes:

• AHT or real contacts per hour is an effective measure to manage productivity
  
• Supervisors know how to use statistics to improve performance
• Listening to 5-10 calls per person per month is an effective way of improving service quality
  
• Managers agree on who their best agents are and understand the characteristics that make them the best
• Team leaders do not have enough time to provide any more coaching of their staff

Learn how you can avoid them

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What You'll Learn

• What are the right measures of contact centre and agent productivity
  
• How first line supervisors should be using statistics in the coaching and development of their staff
• The best way to measure and manage quality
  
• How to have your front line supervisors spending 70% of their time coaching their people

Whitepaper at a Glance

Customer operations (including contact centres, store fronts, ecommerce web sites and back office administration areas) are some of the most measured parts of any organisation today. Of all the customer operations areas, contact centres with masses of data and countless measurement techniques in place to time, classify, measure, record and report on everything people do, should be one of the easiest and most effective places to manage performance and drive improvement. And yet, even contact centres struggle - by examining the issues there, we can gain more insight into issues that apply across all customer operations.

Despite significant investments in technologies designed to drive performance improvement - technologies like quality and contact recording systems, CTI to drive skill based routing, and knowledge management to support people - the potential performance improvements are still not being realised in many customer operations today.

Many customer operations continue to face:

• huge variations in performance between the best and worst people;
• high turnover levels (the average in Australian customer operations is typically 22-25%, however the best are achieving just a fraction of that number even in highly competitive labour markets); and
• waste (repeat contacts average 15% in a series of recent LimeBridge client studies).

There are five myths that dominate so much thought and opinion in the area of customer operations performance management. These myths are:

1. Average handle time or real contacts per hour is an effective measure of productivity.
2. Supervisors know how to use the statistics to improve performance.
3. Sampling 5-10 contacts per person, per month is a valid way to improve the service quality people deliver.
4. Managers agree on who their best performing person is and understand the characteristics that make them the best.
5. Team leaders and coaches are coaching effectively.

In this White Paper, customer operations performance management experts consider the five myths in more detail, to help you understand the impact they have on not just managing performance, but on rapidly gaining the 20-30% improvements in performance that you are striving for.