What is Sales and Service Performance Management?

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What is SSPM?

Why do organizations need SSPM?

What is Merced Performance Suite?

What is Merced Incentive Management?

What is unique about Merced Systems' solutions?

How is SSPM different from standard business intelligence and reporting solutions currently employed by sales and service functions?

What are the typical benefits, ROI and time to payback?

Who within the organization is affected and benefits from SSPM?

What is SSPM?

Sales and Service Performance Management (SSPM) is a unique blend of processes and software designed to help organizations:

• Optimize the customer sales and service lifecycle — including customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value
• Drive sales force and service organization behavior change to meet individual and organizational goals

Because sales and service operations, such as contact centers, field sales, retail sales, partner operations, tele-sales, field service and back office functions, are often people intensive, behavior change and culture transformation are the drivers of sales and efficiency gains. Sales and Service Performance Management is optimized for specific operations and includes domain platforms and data management features plus domain applications to best drive results.

Why do organizations need SSPM?

Too often, sales and service organizations are unable to effectively and efficiently execute on improvement initiatives (such as improved customer experience or increased cross-selling) because success requires coordinated behavior change and alignment across all customer-facing functions.

Why is that so hard?

• Lack of front line visibility into their performance, inhibiting proactive self-improvement
• Inability to put individual employee goals and incentives in context with organizational goals
• Misaligned incentives limit the organization's ability to adapt to changing business conditions
• Limited tools for coaching and other performance-related workflows
• Difficult to quickly implement initiative and business strategy changes at the front line.

What is Merced Performance Suite?

Merced Performance Suite is an advanced, fully integrated performance management application designed from the ground up to turn Sales and Service operations into higher performing, data-driven organizations. By integrating data from disparate sources, delivering advanced reports and analytics throughout the organization and providing personalized dashboards to every employee, Merced Performance Suite increases accountability while establishing a culture of continuous improvement. With category-leading workflow and process improvement tools, Merced Performance Suite automates critical managerial activities, which guide and drive specific employee behaviors every day. Built for customer sales and servicing functions, Merced Performance Suite is optimized for high impact and low cost of ownership for Sales and Service Performance Management initiatives.

What is Merced Incentive Management?

Merced Incentive Management is designed to automate the process of commission, bonus, and incentive administration in support of any type of variable pay strategy, resulting in greater calculation process accuracy, improved sales force motivation and retention, and ultimately a pay for performance system which rewards employees for achieving targets. Built from the ground up to meet the needs of even the largest, most complex operations, Merced Incentive Management is flexible enough to allow organizations to easily adapt their incentive plans to constantly changing market conditions and business needs. With built-in reporting, forecasting and analysis functionality, Merced Incentive Management increases visibility, measurement and control to influence sales behavior and drive business performance across multiple sales channels. With open-source architecture and extensive configuration options, Merced Incentive Management can be rapidly deployed, and easily integrated to leverage existing IT investments.

What is unique about Merced Systems' solutions?

• Multifunctional — Merced Systems offers the only solutions focused on meeting the needs of all customer Sales and Service functions - helping organizations better manage the customer lifecycle. Further, Merced Systems products are designed to empower every employee in the organization — driving behavior change at the front-line to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value.
• Domain specific — Merced Systems delivers an unrivaled depth of sales and service domain expertise, being used by over 300,000 individuals across the globe every day.
• Action-oriented — Merced Systems offers the most advanced solutions providing the tools to automate and standardize key management activities, such as coaching and incentive management, to improve overall sales and service operational performance.

How is SSPM different from standard business intelligence and reporting solutions currently employed by sales and service functions?

Built with critical, domain specific features, Sales and Service Performance Management (SSPM) applications deliver greater business impact by meeting the specific needs of sales and service operations. Key differences between SSPM applications and reporting tools include:

• SSPM is designed to be used by every employee in the organization, every day or intraday
• SSPM delivers domain-specific tools for sales and service operations, including:
• Performance coaching tools and applications
• Complex incentive and variable compensation management tools
• Employee dispute management and resolution processes
• Administrative procedure and rules compliance documenting tools
• SSPM uniquely manages data in operational environments to deliver timely and accurate metrics. Specific capabilities include:
• Organizational and hierarchy management utilities
• Temporal properties management to track change across the organization

What are the typical benefits, ROI and time to payback?

Sales and Service Performance Management (SSPM) helps organizations uncover and fix performance shortcomings. SSPM initiatives deliver high ROI for operations and see a typical time-to-pay-back of 6-9 months. These results are achieved by unleashing 4 major opportunities:

1. Increased Front-Line Employee Productivity and Revenue Generation
Driven by:

• Increased self-correction through frequent viewing of performance data
• Increased coaching time and effectiveness of Supervisors
• More effective variable pay and incentive programs
• Increased sharing of best practices from top employees to developing teammates
• Retention of staff as a result of transparent objectives and improved supervisory management

2. Increased Supervisor Effectiveness and Efficiency
Driven by:

• Reduction in administrative activities, such as data gathering for coaching or performance appraisals
• More efficient and impactful employee coaching due to availability of individual performance data and historical coaching and training context
• Manager and director transparency into Supervisor performance and effectiveness

3. Improved Analyst Performance
Driven by:

• Substantial time savings due to automated data integration and cleansing
• Business-driving insight resulting from focus on analytic tasks vs. repetitive report generating tasks
• Improved strategic decision making process stemming from - "one version of the truth"
• Identification of and focus on true business drivers and metrics - not just data that is easy to access
• Reduced errors and rework

4. Greater Executive Impact from Culture Change
Driven by:

• More fact-based, data-driven decisions; a culture of accountability
• Focus on the meaning, rather than the accuracy, of the data
• Performance-based environment without subjectivity or perception of management bias
• Transparency into performance of the business, across all roles and departments

Who within the organization is affected and benefits from SSPM?

One of the defining characteristics of Service and Sales Performance Management (S2PM) is that every employee, irrespective of his or her role or level, has access to timely and relevant data about their performance. As a result:

• Front-line employees are able to improve their performance by increasing self-correction with frequent viewing of performance data and improved incentives.
• Supervisors are better equipped to coach their employees with immediate access to agent performance data and a reduction in rote administrative activities, such as gathering dispersed employee performance data.
• Executives have access to high level operational performance data that enables them to match employee and team goals to larger operational objectives.