Look beyond the here and now. To effectively support the diverse ways employees will work in the future, businesses must provide their customer-facing teams with access to advanced cloud-based communications services and tools, including streamlined, real-time performance analytics from any device. Organizations looking to support a growing remote, hybrid, and mobile workforce must implement solutions that enable alignment and empower employees to perform at their professional best.
Hybrid work is here to stay. To be successful, organizations and people need to undergo a cultural shift. For companies, this means creating an environment of transparency and trust. They must find or build systems that are accessible to individual employees and support different team goals. Allowing anywhere access to crucial work applications and tools is paramount. However, it seems that organizations have lost sight of the importance of access to performance data.
Merely 17% of agents are extremely satisfied with the frequency of their training, while only 14% feel the same about the metrics used to measure their performance.1
Hybrid workstyles require better insight into performance expectations, progress, and results
Flexible work models have become a competitive advantage in today’s market to attract and retain talent. Training, coaching, and understanding how well your employees are performing is much more difficult when they are not all in the office together. Additionally, companies are adopting more software-as-a-service products that generate more data, and managers are left spending their weeks pulling together information to understand how their teams are doing.
Advanced analytics that deliver data-driven insights for all levels of the organization to understand real-time performance while improving the employee experience, ultimately reducing attrition and driving better business results, are becoming increasingly important.
“Since tracking mini goals in Pathlight, the team has seen an increase in performance of 53%.” Handshake 2
As leaders recognize the measurable impact that their relationships with their teams have on their company’s success, understanding how to better engage with people is essential. Leaders must see themselves less as managers or spreadsheet experts and more as enablers of their employees’ performance. Improving outcomes for each employee is possible when organizations create personalized goals and coaching actions are optimized to attend to their most important development needs. Of utmost importance, customer-facing teams must be able to monitor and track their performance against crucial metrics and see how they compare to the rest of their peers.
Real-time transparency: does your customer-facing team know how it is performing?
As organizations adopt innovative strategies and data-driven insights to support their employees, leaders and associates must embrace new tools for digital engagement and performance intelligence. While initial setup (including training and setting goals and metrics) is necessary and will create instant alignment, your team members do not need to be data scientists to know how they are performing on the job. Understanding their performance in real time should be as easy as pulling up their favorite team’s live score on a sports app. Everything they must know to control their career should be just one click away.
Only 14% of the agents are extremely satisfied with the career paths open to them.3
Visionary business leaders acknowledge the opportunity to build a better normal with a strong focus on data transparency. This approach brings unique benefits, such as greater equity and empowerment, as more users can access data that were previously out of reach. With crucial real-time performance information at their fingertips, customer- facing teams have new opportunities to excel, add value for customers, and control their careers. Team leaders can celebrate their team’s performance or provide individualized, tailored coaching when they fall behind.
By leveraging effective personalized coaching, enhanced employee engagement, and broad access to real- time performance data, companies are now able to drive better business results by focusing on improving individual performance.
Performance Intelligence sets a new bar for coaching and feedback
Any organization can benefit from investing in talent development with the proper tools. Employees should understand performance expectations and how they are performing against their goals and peers at all times. Performance intelligence is different from human resource performance management solutions because it provides real-time data insights into individual performance for goals that the business and team have defined. Also, its openness to everyone, not just managers and executives with data scientists setting up dashboards, differentiates it from business intelligence tools. Moreover, metrics link to organizational charts, so executives can quickly drill up or down through the data to assess performance by region, team, or employee. A best-in-class performance intelligence application is easy to understand and creates a culture of transparency and trust in which everyone has access to the same information.
Real-time access to intelligent data improves employee engagement and results through real-time visual insights, training modules, and insights on actions for improvement. When customer-facing employees have access to their performance data, they are empowered to improve themselves and focus on what matters to them, their team, and the business, which drives accountability and increases success.
Visibility into real-time performance increases the likelihood that more employees will meet their annual or quarterly goals, while eliminating the need for managers to spend hours pulling reports and allowing them to focus on coaching. They know who deserves praise and recognition and who needs training or coaching on a specific skill to improve their performance.
Only one in five agents express a high level of satisfaction with the quality of training available, and 62% report that more skills-based training would improve their performance.4
Performance intelligence makes all of the above possible by helping associates achieve their professional best by combining real-time data with coaching and communication tools.
Act now: Democratize data understanding at all levels and unlock your team’s potential
Companies must leverage the best tools and platforms available to improve customer service performance and realize their team’s full potential, which is especially important for organizations that support remote, flexible, or hybrid teams. This means strengthening relationships with innovative solution providers to create strategic plans to support flexible work styles and develop more engaging and productive ways for managers and employees to communicate, collaborate, and succeed together.
Customer-facing teams need actionable, real-time metrics that are meaningful and easily accessible, but they must always consider how these metrics impact the customer experience (CX). Frost & Sullivan believes that creating an engaged and high-performing workforce is vital to delivering best-in-class CX. Therefore, providing better tools for agents and employees is extremely important to meeting customer expectations.
“After launching Pathlight, CSAT scores went from under 90% to 95% and above, and customer response times (SLAs) fell from 48 to 24 hours and during the week, we average five to seven hours.” Pair Eyewear 5
Organizations that want to remain competitive and relevant to their employees and customers should invest in leading-edge performance solutions that democratize data understanding at all levels, enable improved individual performance, and create diverse interactions across locations and teams.
- CX Trends 2022, Zendesk
- https://blog.pathlight.com/how-handshake-increased-enterprise-sales-performance- by-53-with-pathlight/
- CX Trends 2022, Zendesk
- CX Trends 2022, Zendesk
- https://blog.pathlight.com/how-pair-eyewear-slashed-slas-and-increased-csat
