For many organizations, customer care and service centers pose the biggest engagement challenges. Front-line workers don't get the feedback they need to stay engaged, which can lead to low job satisfaction and high turnover rates. In order to keep any employee –call center or otherwise – engaged and successful, managers must find ways to move them through the four stages of competence.
These top performers very likely operate in the optimal competence stage, which is known as "unconscious competence." Workers in this stage perform actions as second nature. They can work quickly and efficiently, rarely needing outside assistance. The "unconscious" part of the stage comes through training that hones the employee's talents and gives them the confidence to act as a problem-solver.
Moving any employee through the stages is a journey of finding and fixing their shortcomings. In the case of a call center employee, perhaps the agent does not stick to regulatory language on the phone, or they're too eager to end a call that could be turned into a sale. Regardless of the particular area that requires improvement, employees can only improve if they have access to information about their daily performance.
In a traditional call center, performance reviews are based on random samplings of a few calls. A supervisor will listen in and make assumptions about an employee's performance based on that very narrow set of data. Other data could be mixed in, such as average hold times and similar metrics, but listening to conversations is the only way to gain a glimpse into an agent's overall tone and style. This glimpse, however, is often inaccurate, as it only takes into account a tiny percentage of the agent's calls.
Technology tools that automate the monitoring and scoring of all agent-to-customer interactions can help address this problem. Tech tools that transcribe all phone calls, chat, and email conversations into searchable text can give managers a more complete view of an employee's true performance. Employees can also use these transcriptions to reflect on their performance and identify shortcomings. Technologies that similarly capture comprehensive and relevant performance data can play the same role when managing the performance of employees outside of call centers and customer service roles.
Supervisors can also use analytics to guide new hires through the performance stages, spot employees who are a good fit for the team, cut ones who don't have the requisite skills, and pick out future supervisors. Armed with data, managers can cut down on attrition rates and shorten time-consuming training periods.
Supervisors and managers can use data to perform context-based coaching tailored to the individual employee's strengths and weaknesses. If employees understand the coaching is based on their own actual actions and words, then it's much less likely they will disagree with their performance assessments.
Comprehensive data removes ambiguity from coaching so employees can clearly see where they need to improve and where they already excel. The removal of ambiguity creates a clearer path to unconscious competence. Tying relevant metrics tracked by the data – such as "use of empathy" or "within compliance language" in the case of call center agents – to raises and other incentives will spur employees onto the fourth stage of competence more quickly.
Scott Kendrick has 20 years' experience in software product management, design, and marketing for everything from shrink-wrap consumer applications to enterprise cloud solutions. He introduced the tag-line "Listen to your customers – improve your business," which is both something he passionately embraces in marketing and production management and how he articulates the benefit CallMiner Eureka brings to market. Prior to CallMiner, Scott was senior director of global product management at MIVA (an internet search marketing company) and director of product management and marketing for the New Ventures division at Corel Corporation (makers of personal and business software CorelDraw and WordPerfect). Scott holds a BScE in Civil Engineering from Queen's University (Ontario, Canada) and is certified in pragmatic marketing and SCRUM.