In this, the second edition of “Merced goes Global” we’ll start discussing our activities in Asia Pacific. I am writing this blog entry from my hotel room in Hong Kong.

 
I wish that this was my view from the hotel, it is actually the view from a client we visited earlier this week.

The Merced office in Hong Kong was the first office we opened earlier this year. We have both Sales and technical people in Hong Kong and it is the HQ for our North APAC operations,  and covers: Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea.

Our office is in the Entertainment building in Central HK and is easily accessible from anywhere in HK. It also has a pretty good view of the bay and other famous HK landmarks.

Throughout 2011 we have been making significant progress working with a number customers and prospects on both Sales Performance Management (Incentive Compensation Management) projects and Service Performance Management implementations in the region.

Earlier this week we presented at the Hong Kong CIO Summit where the key topics were the proliferation of data, social and mobile in large organizations customer facing organizations.

 

We discussed the necessity of implementing Business Execution solutions across the front-line operations for these organizations in order to better manage customer experience, profitability and drive operational efficiency. People who participated in the discussion included current customers including Dell and other leading organizations including Coca Cola APAC, Standard Chartered Bank, Cathay Pacific, PCCW, HSBC and others. The discussion was based on the theme of the presentation given by Rob Strickland, the previous CIO of T-Mobile and Dish Networks that was given in HK a few months ago and was followed up by a webinar titled “ Transforming Your Contact Center into a Strategic Asset” the recording of which can be found here.

I will continue updating as we make more progress in North APAC. 

The next post will discuss our ASEAN and India operation headquartered in Singapore and the CXO leadership conference in Singapore which Merced sponsored on September 9, 2011.

BTW, this is how I looked as the courier, bringing all the printed material and posters for the event from Hong Kong to Singapore. Pretty bad for a guy who has perfected the art of spending 3 weeks on the road with no more than a 15 pound trolly…

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Author: Gadi Bashvitz

Gadi Bashvitz is Merced’s VP for Asia Pacific and Latin America, he has been with Merced for almost five years and held multiple senior positions in Product Management, Product Marketing, Business Development and Sales.

 In consumer marketing research there are 4 P’s, with the first “P” being People.  Marketers segment consumers by income, geography, gender, age, etc. in order to prescribe the right “treatment” or create the right message to the population.  We are now taking that same segmentation concept and applying it to employee development. 

All employees are not created equal.  We suggest that team leaders and managers segment their employees and then target each segment specifically to get the most from that population.  Segmentation will help the team leaders and managers determine how much time they should spend in meetings, coaching and training with each segment.  Since their time is always tight, we want to make sure we can maximize the benefit team leaders deliver while minimizing time constraints. 

What does employee segmentation mean?  Segmentation is just a way to divide up the team based on performance.  The team can be divided in to:

• Quadrants
• Stack Ranked
• Outliers
• Statistical or Mean-based
• Or divided up manually by the team leader

Not all segments need to be equal in size, as not all segments will need the same coaching or meeting time from the team leader.  For example, I can easily divide a team in to four categories:

• Top Performers
• Solid Performers
• Weak Performers
• Bottom Performers

Depending on the priorities of your business, whether in Sales, Productivity, or Customer Experience, the best way to start employee segmentation is to select one key metric or a balanced score to stack rank the employees; use a metric that is well aligned to your business initiatives.  From there you can decide how to divide up the population, keeping in mind this division will also dictate the team leader’s meeting, coaching and training time for each population group.  Employee segmentation can also address some of the common questions you answer in your organization today, such as, “Who are your top performers, who are your bottom performers, who is struggling?”

For a typical team leader in a Call Center, their team of 21 agents might look something like the graph below:

From the segmentation above, I can easily see I have:
3 Bottom Performers
5 Weak Performers
10 Solid Performers
3 Top Performers

Where would a team leader in your organization likely spend their management and coaching time? Do they get the results your company needs from the current time management decisions (or ‘formula’)?

What we do with these Employee Segments will be covered in my next post – "Where do Team Leaders spend most of their time?"

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Author: Diana Leccese
Diana Leccese is Principal Business Consultant with Merced Systems.  Diana has over 15 years experience in Sales and Service Performance Management as both pre and post sales consultant.  She has worked with Fortune 1000 companies in Telco, Finance, Insurance, and Travel industries.  Diana can be reached at diana.leccese@mercedsystems.com

This entry is the last of a series of entries on the topic of  “What Performance Metrics are Right for my Business?” In previous posts I discussed the first and second tiers of the return on investment from performance management. In this post I’d like to introduce the 3rd tier: Contribute Back.

The final and hardest tier to accomplish is the ability for an organisation to exploit the huge wealth of information in the contact centre to drive product development, give visibility to impending marketing issues such as declining publicity, inform legal of emerging issues and provide insight into changing customer expectations. This requires high levels of expertise within the frontline to extract and capture this information in a way that it can be distributed and reported on by other departments. In addition it now becomes crucial that your workforce morale is high and that your employees are exhibiting proactive and positive behaviours. There are direct and proven correlations between employee morale and customer satisfaction and loyalty.

When measuring knowledge and expertise within your employees a good way is to break your knowledge and coaching into segments or “steps” in order that you can identify when an agent has completed a knowledge segment and is ready to move to a more demanding and complex learning goal. Measuring how many agents are able to transition between these segments can give you a clear idea as to where in the business your experts are. Some of the metrics for this tier would be:

 1. What level of coaching are my agents attaining? Who are my experts?
           Metric: Coaching Attainment Segmentation
 2. What is my employee morale?
           Metric: Employee Satisfaction
 3. Are we capturing the right information at each interaction?
           Metric: Data Quality  4. Where are your interactions most successful and most cost effective
          Metric: Resolution Rate by Channel (Web, Contact Center, Face to Face)
 5. Which interactions are most cost effective and successful?
          Metric: Cost to Resolve by Channel
  
These are some of the "Holy Grail" metrics that enable a business to take full advantage of thier largest customer facing "surface areas" and enable customer satisfaction to be truly met while keeping costs under control.

I look forward to your feedback

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Author: James Burr

James Burr is the Business Consulting Manager with Merced Systems. He has over 7 years experience implementing Sales Performance Management systems in a broad range of industries including Telco, Finance and Automotive. He can be reached at james.burr@mercedsystems.com 

So the World Cup has come and gone for another four years and all the pundits have analysed it to death. Everyone says the best team won and they were always the favourites, so it ran to plan. One thing that does stick out loud and clear though is that apart from the winners it very much didn’t run to plan for any other team.

All the ‘big’ teams went out earlier than anticipated, some badly. Less established and fancied teams did substantially better. Why? and what comparisons can we draw?

If you condense all the punditry right down, each team brought three factors to the party, rather like a company brings a strategy to the market.  Management,  Ability,  Game Plan.

Those that did well blended these three factors and executed against them superbly.  They understood their competitive advantages and made full use of them.

We can all see how England, France and Italy failed against several of these factors, whilst Brazil and Argentina just simply failed to execute. ‘Surprise’ teams such as Uruguay, Paraguay, Holland, even Germany had all these factors and executed well.

So what about in the performance management world?

 
Can you manage your resources well?

Smart, nimble teams, properly motivated can beat much bigger competition, just look at Holland. 

The goals aren't always scored by the players with the biggest pay checks, proving that incentives are important but they’re not the only way to motivate behavior and drive results.  Coaching, team support and competitive comparison drives strong performance.

What about the ability of your team and its individuals?

Who are your best team members and do they know who they are?  Find the metrics that matter and make them count.

What's your game plan ?

Are your team able to play according to the plan or do the processes and systems unempower them? Just how agile are you to adjust your plan mid-game?

Can you execute well? 

With the right performance management on the team helping you drive your competitive advantages you can.

The best team won, it wasn’t a fluke. Have you got the winning team?

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Author: Suzanne Congdon

Suzanne Congdon is EMEA Marketing Manager with Merced Systems.  Suzanne has over 15 years experience working for enterprise software providers delivering solutions and services to the contact centre industry and can be contacted at suzanne.congdon@mercedsystems.com

This entry is part two of three on the topic of “How to drive End User Adoption & Success with your brand new Performance Management Solution?” In my previous post, I introduced the first of seven essentials for adoption success which states that the System will be accepted by users if it promotes the “What’s in it for me?” Today, I will introduce essentials 2-4:

2. The system will be accepted if you explain to me why it is important? Once again, make it simple & tell me “What’s in it for me?  Translate for me how it helps me achieve my goals?
Communication is highly underrated, and often poorly executed! Be organized, plan methodically & clearly determine who is the audience, what kind of communication is needed to them about this solution, what should the vehicle of this communication be, when should it go out to them?  The more informed I have about the new system, the more personalized the message is to me, the more I feel part of the process, the more likely I am to use the system!

3. If I am thoroughly educated on the solution, I am more likely to use it in the way you intended for me to use it!
Yes I want to be trained on the product, but I also want to be trained on the concept of Performance Management. The system is vehicle for Performance Management, but if I don’t understand what Performance Management really means, to me, in my world, how am I supposed to apply it, via this system to appropriately to drive results?  Training around not just the ‘How’ but also the ‘What’ will make me a well educated, effective user!

4. If it is not an additional burden in my day – I am more likely to use it! Weave the usage of the system, and adherence of performance management into my daily fabric. Help me create daily rituals that this solution is part and parcel of. Help make performance management a ‘mindset’ not an extra process: where this is THE way I conduct myself and where system references become part of my daily language! It becomes our culture!

Read my next entry when I share Essentials 5 – 7.

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Author: Aparna Fernandes

Aparna Fernandes is Sr. Director, Customer Success with Merced Systems.  She has more than a decade of experience in fields of performance management, reporting, and strategic planning across various industries, with key focus on developing models for sustained success & business impact with SSPM solutions. She can be reached at aparna.fernandes@mercedsystems.com.

So, you’ve rolled out a performance management system but after an initial spike, usage starts to drop and productivity is not improving.  You wonder, why?
Has System Adoption been an afterthought?
Myth – “I can start to think about system adoption once I have launched my system!” 

This kind of thinking is akin to swinging too late at a fastball you knew was coming. Time it right and you can hit a homerun!

ROI impact will automatically come once I have launched the new tool?
….Only if the launch has been successful in making this system & Performance Management part of your daily DNA – not ‘that extra thing’ to do.

How to make a system “a solution”?
It is as much science as it is art. It is a science, because of the straightforward logical thought process that can be applied in this space; it is an art because it involves people and important words like culture transformation! 

So where do you start?  Start with the end in mind! -  Plan your Launch with End-User Adoption in mind.
7 Essentials for Success…..
1. The System will be accepted by users if it promotes the “What’s in it for me?”
The new system content needs to be relevant, accurate and complete.  If it includes Key performance indicators users are incentivized/ paid on, they are more likely to go there and use it. If the data is reliable and trustworthy, they are also likely to go there.  And if it has everything important in one place, they are even more likely to go there. 

Finally, if you take away all other alternate sources of the same data/content – they will surely go there! I know a friend who once turned down the most prime location for her coffee shop business because they would not guarantee her the “non-compete” clause in her contract. In other words, they would allow a competitive coffee shop to exist right next to her business in the same strip mall. Odds are her user base would be split in half before she even had a chance! I think you get the point….

Read my next entry when I share Essentials 2 – 4.

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Author: Aparna Fernandes
Aparna Fernandes is Sr. Director, Customer Success with Merced Systems.  She has more than a decade of experience in fields of performance management, reporting, and strategic planning across various industries, with key focus on developing models for sustained success & business impact with SSPM solutions. She can be reached at aparna.fernandes@mercedsystems.com.

When looking at Performance Management, a question that gets asked a lot is "What metrics should my company be using to measure performance". The answer given is often a convoluted one involving many caveats, "ifs" and "buts". In this entry, I want to present a different take on how to tell if a metric is meaningful to your organisation and some suggestions for getting the most out of the metrics you already have. This will be part one of a four part series.

The first question to look at is "What is Performance Management" and perhaps the best way to answer this is to look at the answers to two other questions: "What do you expect of your employees?" and "What do your customers expect of you?” The cornerstone of Performance Management lies in exceeding your customers’ expectations during every interaction that they have with your company. Your contact centres and frontline employees are at the heart of this strategy. Performance Management can be defined as: the process of ensuring all levels of your organisation have accurate and timely visibility into the metrics that define your strategy and have the tools available to improve their performance. It's clear that for your company to be successful and meet the two goals of exceeding customer expectations and improving the performance of your employees, your metrics have to reflect where you are as a company. There is no point diving straight to complex KPI's if you haven't laid the foundation stones in your performance management strategy.

When looking at an organisation and the return on investment in Performance Management there are typically 3 tiers that a company will transition through, gaining further benefits at each tier. The tiers are:

1.      Improving Efficiency

2.      Focusing on your Customers

3.      Contributing back to the organization 

The key is to figure out how your company ranks against this structure. In the next couple of weeks, I will delve into each one of these tiers and discuss how to choose metrics and KPIs to measure performance in each tier.

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Author: James Burr

James Burr is the Business Consulting Manager with Merced Systems. He has over 7 years experience implementing Sales Performance Management systems in a broad range of industries including Telco, Finance and Automotive. He can be reached at james.burr@mercedsystems.com

As the initial shock over the receding economy has started to fade, smart companies are starting to think more strategically for the long-term - not just what the end of the quarter will bring.  With long-term business plans in mind, what are some of the guiding principles companies should follow?

1. Alignment - What really matters to your business - to your customers, employees, and shareholders?  What are the measures and metrics that align with those stakeholders' values?  And most importantly, what actions must be taken to make progress against these measures?  Doesyour operation have the integrated coaching and workflow to close the performance gap?  Are there effective public recognition or incentive programs to reward both performance and progress toward goal?  Can your organization focus and align your employees' activities on the 3-5 critical measures they can impact, empowering them to act appropriately to attain both personal and company goals?  Giving front-line employees and managers the power to track their KPI's daily and their rank among peers helps bolster self-correction.  Giving supervisors the information and tools they need to improve their coaching drives accountability for the alignment of staff with results.

2. Reducing Variability - Variability limits an organizations' ability to improve performance and attain business goals. By identifying sources of both rep performance and business process variation, and then defining initiatives to reduce the occurrence of variability, operations can significantly improve customer experience while reducing operational expense. Where does your organization see variation in performance? What approaches have you taken to reduce this variation? Most organizations focus on the "outliers," or invest too much time singling out bottom performers. Instead, try to identify the employee segments where improvement can have the biggest impact (often mid-performers), and develop the necessary coaching and employee development processes around the needs of this group.

3. Accountability - Accountability within an organization is what makes a strategic plan stick.  But where does accountability come from?  When front-line employees have visibility into their current and past performance, and can see the business impact they and their team are having on the organization, strategic initiatives can mature from a "flavor of the month" program to an embedded or ritualized aspect of the business.  Engagement and accountability at the executive level is critical to developing the organizational infrastructure needed to succeed.  And without buy-in and program commitment at the top, any strategic initiative can prove to be a dead end.

Taking action on all of these principles simultaneously may appear daunting, but attempting to answer any of these questions will yield progress. What would it take to answer only 1-2 of these questions in your organization this week?