6 Steps to an Effective Employee Performance Management Strategy

Have you ever sat at a traffic light, wondering why it takes so long for it to turn green? Have you ever fantasized about owning one of those mysterious remote controls that would allow you to control all traffic lights on your drive? I know I certainly have. There is probably nothing more frustrating than a traffic light instructing you not to move when there is no other traffic. The red light tells you to wait, but you want to go!

In a way, many performance management solutions for contact centers work the same way.

You probably look at, monitor, and analyze many different KPIs, such as average handle time, time to answer, interactions per day, longest wait times, idle time—the list goes on and on. You probably also compare your employees, teams, groups, locations, or geographies. Just because you can.

Through all sorts of contact center tools and technologies, you probably also have a set of dashboards that show who is doing well, who is yellow, and who is red. And based on this information, you determine your “Get to green” plan.

But most of these systems do not give you two things: Typically, they do not tell you why some of your employees struggle to make the threshold, nor do they tell you what to do next. They simply show you colors like a traffic light.

Of course, each contact center vendor will tell you that they enable you to “turn information into actions.” The problem is that you need to uncover the information on your own and determine what the action is.

But what if you had a tool that could really transform your employee engagement strategy? This week’s acquisition of Silver Lining Solutions further expands Genesys’ capabilities to help organizations elevate employee engagement and improve business results related to sales, collections, workforce productivity, and customer satisfaction.

Using the following steps, you can implement an effective performance management strategy, get real business results, and really understand why your top performers do so well. You’ll also learn how to apply this to your onboarding, coaching, and learning processes.

1. Assess the skills and knowledge of your employees: By understanding the skills and the skill gaps of your employees you have a clear view of their learning and development needs. Now you can spend your training budget much more effectively and make training more engaging for your employees.
2. Automatically correlate data with employee skills: By directly linking performance data to employee skills, you can see why your top performers do so well. Understanding what skill really drives results allows you to change your hiring profiles and greatly improve the effectiveness of employee coaching.
3. Survey your employees: Asking your employees to tell you what works, what does not work, and how they prefer to learn can greatly help to increase employee engagement and make learning much more effective.
4. Build individualized training plans: Using the information above, you can automatically build a training curriculum for each individual employee and take into account their preferred learning styles.
5. Find the best time to offer learning: When integrated into your workforce planning tool, you can quickly determine who needs what type of training, and when the best time is to conduct an instructor-led training class. You can also offer quick knowledge nudges straight to the employees’ desktop application when volumes are low, based on real-time availability of your staff. And when you need to reschedule training, it’s done by the click of a button, instead of building another Excel-based training schedule.
6. Offer career opportunities: By creating job profiles with clear skill and knowledge requirements—and by offering the right training to move up the corporate ladder—you can offer career perspective to the workforce. They know exactly what to do and what knowledge to obtain to get that promotion.

By using an integrated approach to omnichannel contact center capabilities and performance management, you can drive some real business results.

And these results have been proven. After Telenor, a multi-national telecommunications company based in Norway, integrated Genesys Skills Management, the company experienced increasing sales performance by 20% and significantly improved NPS scores for new advisors.

“The biggest win was that, for the first time, we could bring our new advisors up the curve. Now, we have a platform for achieving desirable knowledge levels and training advisors before placing them in a live customer environment.”

– Torhild-Torgersen Hage, Senior Project Manager at Telenor

To learn more about what skills management from Genesys can do for your business, read the full Telenor case study today.

Read more about how your workforce can be your most strategic asset in the contact center in our eBook, Contact Center Employee Playbook.