To motivate employees to embrace and achieve company goals, more and more firms are tying pay to performance. Managers, in turn, are monitoring, tracking and measuring that performance through new solutions that enable automatic continual evaluation and reporting, with little interruption to either an agent's or manager's day-to-day responsibilities. These technologies provide supervisors with comprehensive scoring and evaluation programs that point out gaps in service, tools and training, and makes recommendations on how firms can maximize agent performance.

Bernd Elliot, research director at Gartner Inc., says new recording and evaluating tools go beyond the straight monitoring techniques of the old days, because their multiple capabilities offer mechanisms to encourage agents to improve and learn from their mistakes. Now, quality assurance is becoming part of a set of functions that, together, improve the overall quality and operation of the center. "Many business models [no longer view] the contact center...as a cost center," Elliot says. "This is your primary contact with current customers and possible future customers," and that means tremendous opportunities for growing revenue.

Manual processes no longer enough
For today's customer-focused contact centers, manual processes -- such as recording agents live and marketing their progress on spreadsheets -- are not fast enough and don't provide enough insight to allow managers to see where fixes are necessary. Although such processes still may work in small contact centers (those with 50 or less agents) larger centers will see significant cost savings and lower attrition by using current technologies.

A comprehensive Quality Assurance solution generally offers capabilities such as audio mining, self-scheduling, desktop-recording devices, self-training tools, e-learning training programs, workforce management, automatic-feedback devices and mechanisms that survey customers on every call. Gartner's Elliot says that contact centers that offer such functions also typically provide good working conditions and quality management practices.

New capabilities generate results
That type of environment is exactly what Insight Communications, a New York City-based cable company that services Illinois,  Kentucky,  Indiana and Ohio, aims to achieve among customer service reps (CSRs) across its 18 call centers. Kina Benton, a customer-service trainer at the Lexington, Kentucky center, oversees 40 reps and says she wants each interaction with CSRs to be a pleasant one for the customer. "When they call in and conduct their business, I want them to be confronted with courteous service and presented with accurate information; and I want us to be able to address any problems and concerns in a positive manner," she says.

After recording each of her agents three times a month -- a process that Benton was not able to achieve before Insight deployed a technology called Customer Experience Management System (CEMS) -- she examines the automatically printed graph that visually ranks different aspects of every call. She then evaluates the agents by simply clicking on the scoring form that is embedded into the system. The solution calculates the point system for a particular call, creates a graph and provides the average score. Benton then shows the graphs to the agents and lets them listen to calls that need improvement. Now the agents know exactly what they need to work on. Prior to using the new system, Benton was not able to gauge performances and compare agents. Agents also never received the consistent and descriptive feedback necessary to improve their skills.

Benton says since using the monitoring and scoring system, the average monthly score per agent grew from around 2.8 to 3.1, on a 4.0 scale. "When you give the reps constant feedback, let them know what you expect and give them positive reinforcement, people will respond," she says. "I happen to think everyone wants to be successful."

Rather than reward her reps, she verbally recognizes them during meetings, then they reward themselves by self-promoting after reaching specified attendance, performance and sales levels. With each job level CSR1and CSR2 reps earn additional money. With each level also comes increased responsibility. "They're in charge of their own destiny," she says. "I constantly give them feedback and help them to the best of my ability to reach their goals so they can make more money and feel successful."

Larry Hennessey, president and director of technology for contact-center solutions company DCR (monitoringmadeeasy.com), which offers CEMS, says that CSRs must continually be motivated to maintain their interest in the business. "Sensitivity is essential because agents are your face to the customer. They have a job to do, but as part of it, the company must provide them with a good work environment, comfortable surroundings and good tools so they can be responsive to customers' needs. "Evaluating agents on a part-time basis, says Hennessey, will not ensure that agents are achieving effective communication.

Intertwine weaves higher success
For Intertwine, a 3-year-old contact center service bureau operating solely in The Netherlands for mobile-service provider Dutchtone, recording and surveying its 150 agents has definitely raised the level of success for Dutchtone, as well as the level of achievement for Intertwine. The company's absenteeism rates and recruitment costs are among the lowest in the country, and employee-satisfaction surveys typically score high. In January, the mobile provider won an award for best customer service in the mobile industry in The Netherlands.

Rutger Pekelharing, managing director of Intertwine, attributes the win to the close attention paid to agents' performances. He says that Intertwine promises its clients that agents are logged in on time, all the time and for the entire length of the call. [Note: The old system would sometimes hang up on customers half-way through the call.] To ensure that those promises are met, Pekelharing says the company has implemented numerous small processes to motivate, recognize and reward its agents.

For example, service reps are evaluated and scored by their team coach. Using an extensive method that Intertwine developed in-house, the system examines agent, IT and process issues, as well as highlights improvement plans. Then, every week, agents receive a Personal Performance Report detailing productivity and quality achievements in the previous week. Reps also receive team-performance reports to compare results.

An important part of the evaluation process stems from the scoring system, powered by the NICE Universe call center solution. Every two weeks, Pekelharing evaluates six calls per agent and scores three. A large part of the score is impacted by the company's interpretation of the customer's satisfaction during that call. Intertwine calls it "first-call resolution" criteria. The calls later are discussed with agents using an electronic evaluation form. "Our evaluation methodology allows us, together with the agent, to pinpoint what previously hampered 100-percent customer satisfaction," Pekelharing says. "Everything we learn during the customer experience should be fed back to our client and our own organization to ensure improvements are quickly made to the technology and information infrastructure, to company and customer processes, to training modules and to agent skills."

On the desktop, the company delivers knowledge transfer, system simulations and customer-dialogue simulation. To maintain the control process, managers randomly call clients in the system on a weekly basis to verify if the measurements were perceived the same way by the customer. "This keeps us sharp," he adds. "The combination of the recorded data, plus our own developed scoring and evaluation method, give us all the data we need to analyze the ingredients of a good customer experience."

The agents at Intertwine understand that the tools are there for their benefit, Pekelharing says. "It makes them more proficient in their work. They gain more confidence with which to demonstrate to other departments, on which they are so dependent, the improvements that need to be made, which in turn improves their work environment, thus empowering them."

Rewarding ensures success
While providing agents with feedback has been known to optimize the customer's experience, rewarding agents has the same effect. Sensitivity to their needs -- financial or otherwise -- is a critical step in fostering a welcoming work environment and increasing agent retention. Old-style "command-and-control" management techniques won't work to achieve these goals, says Pekelharing. "You can't make [agents] deliver a top experience. They have to want to deliver it. They have to be proud of it and they have to be able to do it," he states. To get there, "They need recognition that they are succeeding in a tedious, difficult, repetitive job." Recognition, he says, that comes from management. "We are at their service."

One of the ways Intertwine ensures that its agents succeed in their jobs is by rewarding them with knowledge. The company currently is heavily investing in e-learning technology that will provide its staff members with an opportunity to advance. When employees understand that these tools are there for their benefit, they become more proficient in their work and gain confidence. "We have a motto here,"Pekelharing says: "Knowledge should be between the ears, not in a system. Once the knowledge is in the agent, you can work to improve productivity, quality, handling times. In terms of incentives, we believe that personal, agent attention and care, as well as small, visible, fun awards work best." While financial rewards are important, he adds, "They are not the main driver."

Helping to reduce turnover
Jackie Wiedner, director of product marketing at NICE, whose headquarters reside in Israel, says more call centers are moving to a pay-per-performance structure, so the more criticism that is placed on agents' performance, the better the quality monitoring system they should have in place.

Wiedner says to create continuous agent recognition, contact-center managers can take their recorded voice and screen captures and transport them as training modules to other agents, as a form of recognition of a perfect call and an excellent example of service. "It's great recognition for the agent who actually provided the great service and the agent receiving it is actually learning a great deal by looking at the example."

The biggest reason today for agent turnover is lack of skills, adds Wiedner, so embedded e-learning tools are quality career-path features. Companies, she says, can use performance metrics as the venue for tracking whether an agent has reached another skill level, therefore easily moving to the next tier of call difficulty and pay raise. One mobile customer, she says, reduced its agent turnover rate to half of the industry average -- 2.8 percent a year -- by tracking skill levels.

Letting agents know that they've satisfied customers is another part of rewarding agents. By filtering in the customer-service data and crossing that with training results from customer-survey data, as well as training scores and quality monitoring results, call-center managers can look at the bigger picture, says Wiedner. As a result, they're able to drive thorough incentive-based pay performances.

At New York City-based long-distance provider Verizon, Patricia Fester manages 139 reps across two contact centers in Elmira and Binghamton, N.Y. She says rewarding her reps is an important part of motivating them, and because her budget for rewards has increased in recent years, she's able to offer greater incentives.

After looking at a combination of performance, time off and sales levels each month, she gives the agents "report cards." Those with high scores receive prizes that range from McDonald's coupons to DVD players to luggage. As a result, she says sales and performance levels have been steadily rising. "Everybody is recognized; it's a team," she says. "We're like no other business -- we just want to be the best."

The new monitoring capabilities mentioned in this article are helping to create a completely connected employee-relationship loop, where incentives, rewards, feedback and training can be tied directly to a company's corporate strategies. The more agents know and are empowered to do, the better they can handle inquiries and keep customers happy. In fact, perhaps the loop is not a circle, but more of a figure 8, where the left side (the employee loop) and the right side (the customer loop) are completely connected and ever moving and evolving. What a powerful and profitable visual that makes.