General White Papers

The Value of Sales and Service Performance Management
The need for greater operational control over sales and service functions in large enterprises is a trend that is gathering momentum across a wide range of industries. At stake is the requirement for lower costs, greater profitability and improved return on investment in an increasingly complex, global business environment.

The Art of Coaching in the Contact Center
The Art of Coaching in the Contact Center highlights the critical tools and information supervisors, managers, and directors need to know: who, when, how often, and in what manner to coach.

Contact Center Process Improvement
Leading contact centers are linking statistics and best practices in similar ways to better manage their operations. This process, known as performance management, drives key behavior change in organizations through the use of data, and helps operations manage more efficiently and effectively.

Data-Driven Management and Transformation
Just as Billy Beane used data-driven management to reshape the Oakland A's major league baseball team into a world-class, winning organization, so too can contact center operations use metrics and data to drive operational process improvement and efficiency, align coaching sessions with organizational strategy, and lower costs.

The ROI of Performance Management
Performance Management solves a myriad of operational challenges, such as inefficient coaching and development processes, siloed and inconsistent information, and outdated performance metrics, delivering opportunities for improved productivity and increased profitability.

The Critical Link — Supervisors
To increase Supervisor effectiveness, leading Contact Centers are using performance management tools and processes to tackle key challenges, including the amount of time spent on administrative tasks vs. coaching, inconsistent managerial processes across teams and sites, and the ability to use data for decision making.

Best Practice and Benchmarking Studies

Coaching Best Practices and Benchmarking Study
Operations today are severely underutilizing critical coaching tools and practices. The Coaching Best Practices and Benchmarking Study findings identify current front line coaching and development practices in the contact center industry and helps organizations answer critical questions about their own operations.

Performance Management Best Practices Study
Based on industry research, Merced Systems found that operations use a wide variety of technologies — most commonly homegrown tools — to support performance management activities. However, delivery of critical performance data to individuals on the front line is often inconsistent and unable to provide a holistic view of individual performance.

Sales and Service Product Datasheets

MPS v 3.0
Merced Performance Suite empowers every employee in the operation with actionable data and the management tools needed to change employee behavior, facilitating significant improvements in customer satisfaction, revenue generation, and productivity. 

MPS Global Edition
Merced Performance Suite Global Edition enhances Merced Performance Suite's award-winning capabilities by delivering performance content in multiple languages in a single customer instance and implementation.

Merced PowerCoach
Merced PowerCoach is the first targeted, on demand application delivering the tools and insight to help operations improve coaching effectiveness and efficiency.

Call Center Express
Call Center Express is a quick-to-deploy application designed for companies interested in leveraging a performance management solution in their contact centers.  It delivers critical best practices in monitoring and managing contact center KPIs, drives personalized goals and performance milestones for every employee in the operation.

Merced Incentive Management ROI
Powerful ICM applications not only increase employee performance and drive sales, but also influence sales behaviors and motivate staff.  As a result, sales organizations can gain a competitive advantage and increase market share.

The Case for ICM Solutions
Incentive Compensation Management systems are not purely financial tools. Rather, these systems contribute to improved plan administration, calculation accuracy, workflow control and achievement reporting.  ICM applications, such as Merced Incentive Management are critical to driving sales performance.

ICM is Critical to Employee Relationship Management
ICM is a cross-over application which should be an integral part of any organization's performance and reward strategy.  An appropriately incented workforce creates a cohesive and collaborative work culture.

Effective Customer Acquisition and Revenue Generation with ICM
Companies committed to an effective growth strategy will look to differentiate by implementing imaginative and flexible incentive plans through ICM software that motivate and tie performance to company profit objectives.

Best of Breed ICM vs. Spreadsheets and Homegrown Tools
Merced Incentive Management's inherent flexibility, powerful modeling, and analytical capabilities gives management teams the tools they need to implement and measure the effect of incentive plans across the enterprise, reducing operational costs, streamlining the administration effort, and offering visibility into and control over compensation cost.

The Case for Best of Breed ICM vs. Enterprise Platforms
Best of Breed ICM vendors offer the expertise to manage the complexities associated with variable pay, whereas enterprise vendors sell in modules that only partially address a company's incentive plan needs.  To be effective, an ICM implementation demands expert software combined with expert service delivery.

Working More Productively with IFAs
Incentive Compensation Management applications like Merced Incentive Management enables organizations to differentiate themselves and increase profitability through high quality customer service.

Initiative Datasheets

What Is Performance Management?
Performance Management uses data for business improvement by leveraging metrics, reports, analytics and workflow to clarify goals, align the organization, and uncover opportunities for business improvement.

Customer Experience
Performance Management delivers personalized views into the customer experience and a set of targeted front line improvement tools to ensure delivery of the highest quality customer interactions possible.

Service-to-Sales
Performance Management addresses service-to-sales transformation challenges by providing the entire organization with a comprehensive view into sales and service performance to help increase the sales effectiveness of front line employees while helping balance revenue generating activities with productivity targets.

Reducing Attrition
Performance management programs can help reduce undesirable turnover by turning data in the operation into a set of targeted retention activities, helping supervisors reduce voluntary staff defection.

Business Function

Contact Center
Performance Management has become a standard management activity in call centers today, helping operations to uncover and fix hidden inefficiencies and disparities in performance.

Field Service
Performance management tools offer field service organizations the ability to provide timely and accurate data across teams, roles and sites, ensuring consistency of reporting and communication to a dispersed workforce with the goal of improving technician service and sales performance.

Back Office
Helping back office operations overcome challenges such as inconsistent and untimely data and widely varied skill levels across employees, performance management applications enable organizations to meet productivity targets, reduce errors, and improve key management processes.

Enterprise Products

Merced Performance Suite
Merced Performance Suite v3.0 is an advanced, fully integrated performance management application designed from the ground up to turn customer operations into higher performing, data-driven functions. By integrating data from disparate sources, delivering advanced reports and analytics throughout the organization, automating critical managerial activities, and providing personalized dashboards to every employee, Merced Performance Suite v3.0 increases accountability while establishing a culture of continuous improvement.

Merced Incentive Management
Merced Incentive Management enables companies to better manage their sales productivity and customer acquisition efforts to maximize customer lifetime value. The application is designed to automate the process of commission, bonus, and incentive administration, resulting in greater calculation process accuracy, improved sales force motivation, and ultimately a pay for performance system which rewards employees for achieving targets.

Express Products

Merced PowerCoach
Merced PowerCoach is the first targeted, on demand application delivering industry best practices for employee coaching processes. Delivering critical best practices in monitoring coaching activity, documenting development sessions, and delivering personalized goals and performance milestones to front-line employees, Merced PowerCoach delivers the tools and insight operations need to drive improved coaching effectiveness and efficiency. Through consistent coaching practices applied across an organization, operations can improve customer satisfaction, productivity and revenue.

Incentive Management Express
Based on industry best practices, Incentive Management Express is a quick-to-deploy application, offering a wide array of domain specific features and tools allowing organizations to model, automate and streamline commissions, bonuses and variable pay incentives.

Call Center Express
Call Center Express is a quick-to-deploy application designed for companies interested in leveraging a performance management solution in their contact centers. It delivers critical best practices in monitoring and managing contact center KPIs, drives personalized goals and performance milestones for every employee in the operation, and standardizes the coaching process across the organization.

Other

Merced Operations Center
Merced Operations Center is an advanced intraday interval-level reporting product built for command center and contact center management. Merced Operations Center delivers a holistic view of intraday contact center operational performance as well as the tools leaders need to manage and improve performance.