How to empower employees & raise service levels with performance management

At Service Management Expo 2011, Sumair Dutta, Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group made perhaps the most important point for service directors today – for organisations the road to service excellence is not just about technology, although that is a key part of it. People need to be integral to service improvement, with organisations adopting a more joined-up, and dynamic approach to enable the workforce. It’s about using tools and communications to collaborate with and empower employees, to ensure that motivation and high performance is paramount along the way.

A motivated workforce is integral to happy customers. Our recent YouGov survey found that 67% of UK homeowners believe customer service has either stayed the same or deteriorated over the past three years. Significantly, the most frequent cause of disgruntled customers was interaction with an organisation’s frontline staff; almost half (49%) of those surveyed cited unfriendly and impolite staff as the most common reason for poor customer service.

With this in mind, we have developed a guide to performance management and employee engagement, with a view to achieving customer service excellence:

1. Define performance metrics

Establish a clear framework of what business attributes you want to measure and what the subsequent performance thresholds are. These may help you to determine how your organisation is currently performing and what you seek to achieve in the future.

2. Turn metrics into measures

Translate the framework into employee measures and supplement as appropriate. It may be an option to include additional employee reward measures such as the use of scarce skills and/or penalties such as logging on late and failure to obtain a customer’s signature.

3. Provide timely feedback

Agree what the acceptable time delay in communicating performance results is. Providing feedback to employees is an important part of performance management and to be effective, should be done in a timely manner. Monthly or less dilutes the effect that feedback may have on the employee and the actions they may take to improve performance.

4. Use information to motivate

Consider how you’re going to give feedback to field-based employees and how to prompt them if necessary. If individual performance data is automatically shared then employees can see where their performance is below the expected level.

5. Allow employees to appeal

Sometimes there can be valid reasons for employees not reaching an expected outcome - such as a job over-running - and it is best to provide a channel for employees to be able to provide justification for these variances.

6. Promote the positive and discourage the negative

Decide how to act on employee performance information. You may want to publish a league table of employees but it may be more appropriate to only publicise the top performers as exemplars whilst simultaneously allowing you to target the lower performers for improvement.

7. Ensure timely data collection

Determine how to collect the information you need in a timely manner. In a field service and customer-driven environment, reacting to changing events in the field in anything less than real-time reduces the opportunity to act and prevent problems escalating.

8. Make information easily digestible

Carefully consider how all this information is displayed. Real-time performance data needs to be shared in a manner where it can be rapidly understood and acted upon if thresholds are breached. Although simplistic, the right type of graphical data representation is key when considering usability.

9. Don’t forget the detail

Ensure that you are able to filter or drill down through the organisational hierarchy. To address any problems and identify positive behaviours whilst isolating the negative, you need visibility across all levels including regions, teams and individuals.

10. It’s not just about technology

For technology to realise its full potential, it has to recognise the role that people play in the service equation – people may be part of the problem, but they’re also part of the solution. Performance management recognises this and whilst the intelligent use of technology can help considerably, it does not replace the need for management action. 

For more advice regarding the use of performance management to increase service levels download the full guide Performance Management:  A Background & 10 Recommendations.