Performance management is one of many moving parts in WEM. Contact centers focused on driving success while empowering employees to reach goals can benefit from effective performance management tools and practices.
These performance tools can work in tandem with your WFM software to give employees visibility into their productivity, promoting motivation to improve customer interactions and enhance their skills.
Let’s take a look at how performance management software can boost your contact center’s operations.
What is performance management
Performance management is the practice of continually assessing an employee’s productivity based on their job expectations, responsibilities, and goals. Effective performance management includes clear and frequent communication between managers and employees, as well as providing thorough feedback and training to see improved results.
Software tools like Aspect Performance™ simplify managing goals for both individual employee and entire teams across contact centers. Performance management software can provide automated solutions to goal tracking and coaching, offering better communication and feedback opportunities between managers and their direct reports.
Key features of performance management software
While evaluating software for your contact center, you’ll want to consider the key features a performance management tool should include. Efficient performance management tools should have:
- Intraday performance metrics
- Goal tracking and alignment
- Comprehensive key performance indicator (KPI) monitoring
- Robust analytics and reporting
- Coaching tools across different training areas
- Communication options for clear feedback
KPIs your contact center should be tracking
Depending on your organization, your contact center may value different KPIs. Performance management software can make it simple to track KPIs that are most valued across your workforce, making it easier to recognize productivity trends and finding room to improve metrics. Tracking these KPIs can also provide insights into where your employees are doing well, fostering a culture of recognition and reward for quality work.
These are just a handful of important KPIs you can monitor with tools like Aspect Performance™:
- Average handle time (AHT): the amount of time it takes to complete a service interaction.
- First call resolution (FCR): how many customers have their issue resolved on the first call.
- Service level: the number of calls answered within a specified time frame.
- Average wait time (AWT): the amount of time a customer must wait before reaching an agent.
- Abandon rate: the number of customers that end an interaction before resolution.
How performance management and WFM work together
A major portion of workforce engagement management is finding effective ways to improve employee performance, while promoting positive work culture and satisfaction. Tools in the Aspect WorkforceOS™ platform work together to build a comprehensive view productivity across a contact center’s workforce.
Aspect Workforce provides robust, actionable data insights that seamlessly integrate into Aspect Performance™. This provides a real-time view performance metrics across a workforce, ensuring accurate and clear visibility of productivity. Supervisor dashboard views allow for management to identify coaching opportunities and proactively assist agents. Employee dashboards views can be personalized to give contact center agents clear access to their KPIs to promote consistent work.
Learn more about how an online car retailer used Aspect solutions to improve performance across its contact center.
Top benefits of performance management software
Implementing performance management software can help drive success in your contact center. These are some of the top ways tools like Aspect Performance™ can boost operations in your organization:
Create a culture of continuous improvement
Performance management tools make it simple for supervisors to provide frequent feedback and timely acknowledgment. This can help develop a culture of continuous improvement, encouraging employees to reach higher service standards.
Aspect WorkforceOS™ includes access to Aspect League™, a workforce gamification tool that makes continuously improving KPIs into healthy competition. Utilize Aspect Performance™ and League in tandem to create contact center culture based in attaining new goals through challenges and valuable coaching.
Promote positive, consistent customer service interactions
Personalized dashboards in Aspect Performance™ offer employees transparent views into their work performance. When used with Aspect Workforce, supervisors can create customizable thresholds to send alerts when KPIs aren’t in alignment with performance expectations. The integrated WorkforceOS™ platform also includes automated training modules to proactively assist employees during times where supervisor intervention isn’t possible.
Improve communication and alignment across teams
Boost employee satisfaction by ensuring individual goals are aligned with larger business objectives. Employee are more likely to understand their work and be satisfied with their role when they understand how they fit into the bigger picture. Better communication of goals and clear expectations surrounding roles can read to higher employee satisfaction and lower turnover.
Aspect Performance™ offers views into KPIs at the individual level, team level, and at a full organizational level. Having a visualization of goal alignment and impact can improve coordination and communication across your contact center.
Make informed, data-driven decisions
Performance management software can empower decision making with data-based insights. Software tools with comprehensive performance reporting allow workforce planners to identify trends across a contact center. Supervisors or leadership can then make informed data-supported business choices to improve operations.
When choosing your performance management software, consider tools with robust integration options to give you access to data from several sources. WorkforceOS™ seamlessly integrates with other systems like CRM, CCaaS, BI, HR, and payroll tools. Enhance reporting and data analysis with a unified view of performance from your tech stack.
Do you need performance management software
If you’re considering adding performance management tools to your workforce efforts, it’s important to set clear objectives that you’d like to achieve with new tools. Think about the following questions during your consideration process:
- Are your contact center KPIs meeting industry benchmarks?
- Have you seen negative trends in your KPIs over time?
- Is your contact center seeing any other performance challenges?
- What feedback have you received from customers? Consider CSAT and NPS scores here.
These are jus a few questions to consider, but it’s important to fully evaluate your workforce management efforts before deciding on new software addition. If you’re looking for insights on how to buy contact center software, check out our latest blog series.
How Aspect Performance™ has redefined productivity
Contact centers in several industries have driven employee productivity and higher customer satisfaction with upgraded workforce tools. Comprehensive platforms like Aspect WorkforceOS™ include workforce management and performance management tools, unifying strategies to enhance productivity.
RCN, an Aspect customer, utilized Aspect Workforce™, Quality, and Performance together to create an employee-centric culture that also focuses on the customer experience. RCN saw improvements in nearly every performance metric by using dashboards customized to separate supervisor and employee needs. Access to real-time metrics across teams also developed a culture of healthy competition, holding employees accountable for high quality work. This improved RCN’s NPS score by 41 points over 3 years. Read the full RCN case study to learn more about success in their contact center.
Explore more case studies to see how Aspect’s workforce technology has shaped success for organizations of all sizes across various industries.
Interested in learning more about Aspect’s performance management solutions? Contact our sales team to get a hands-on demo of WorkforceOS™ and how our tools can boost performance in your contact center.
