By TMCnet Special Guest
Bob Cowen, Snowfly

I’ve visited hundreds of contact centers over many years. On almost every visit, I have seen hanging banners, wall posters, graphs, charts, spinning mobiles, or scrolling notices across reader boards all promoting some sort of ongoing reward program or limited duration contest aimed at motivating agents to improved performance. These types of incentive programs are now supplemented with employee balanced score cards and very detailed agent analytics.

Why Use Incentives?

The objective is to improve the bottom line by: selling more, improving attendance, reducing turnover, improving KPIs such as first call resolution or average handle time. Studies have shown that most employees are capable of 20 percent to 40 percent more productivity without additional training or work related tools or resources. Management’s biggest challenge is to elicit this discretionary effort from their employees.

Intergenerational Disconnect?

A key characteristic of Gen X and Gen Y employees is the need for constant praise and feedback. The days of “if you do a good job, you get to keep it” and/or “unless you are told otherwise, you can presume that you’re doing a good job” are long gone. In many cases, contact center management (often composed of baby-boomers) has been slow to adapt to this. This intergenerational disconnect significantly limits management’s ability to glean discretionary effort from Gen X and Gen Y employees in spite of their extensive efforts.

Don’t Lose Their Interest

In addition to a lack of integration with agent score cards and analytics, many incentive and reward programs suffer from the same expensive and often fatal flaw. Employees lose interest if it is perceived that there is no chance of being rewarded for achieving a goal. They give up; motivational power of the incentive has been nullified. For example, if an agent has one poor quality score at the beginning of the week, then there is no chance that they can be rewarded for achieving a weekly quality score of 98 percent. At this point, they will adopt the attitude of “Why over exert myself if I won’t be rewarded” and revert to average levels of performance.

Micro Goals

The best solution is to break down long-term goals into smaller components and reward them as they occur. I refer to these as micro-goals. Reinforcing micro-goals as they happen is a critical component to maximizing the return on each dollar spent for incentives. For example rather than an award for monthly perfect attendance, offer rewards for daily attendance and a bonus for five consecutive days of attendance (five consecutive days is better than rewarding for M-F attendance where, if an employee is absent any time during the first few days of the week, they will give-up until the beginning of the next week). Micro-goals fulfill the needs of Gen X & Y for constant feedback as well as prevent the erosion of hope that is fatal to many incentive programs.

If They Achieve, Reward Them… Always

Call centers are often too focused on staying under budget thus elect to reward only the very top performers as opposed to everyone who achieves a specific threshold. Not only does this prevent an incentive program from reaching its true revenue and/or cost saving potential, it can result in negative side effects that will lead to far more serious problems. As an agent, how would you feel if you worked hard to improve your call quality score from the call center average of 90 percent to 95 percent only to be snubbed because five people (the same five that always get rewarded) scored better than you? If the goal of an incentive program is to raise productivity as much as possible, everyone who achieves a goal should be rewarded. If reward thresholds are set correctly, the more agents that are rewarded, the more revenue you generate or more money you save.

Paper or Plastic?

Take a grocery bag (paper or plastic) and place bills of various denominations in it. The quantity and denominations will depend upon your budget but for this example, place one $50 bill, two $20 bills, four $10 bills, eight $5 bills and 140 $1 bills in the bag. Place the grocery bag in a visible place. Every time an agents achieves a micro-goal or demonstrates a desirable behavior or activity, take the grocery bag to the agent’s desk and let the employee blindly reach into the bag and remove a specific number of bills. This seemingly simple activity causes some very large and significant motivational effects:

--The employee receives immediate recognition from the boss (continuous feedback and positive reinforcement)
--Other agents observe their coworker being rewarded (peer recognition)

--The reward is closely tied to the activity (not delayed until the next payroll or the end of a contest)

--Drawing bills from the bag is fun and exciting because the actual amount of the reward is unknown until the bills are drawn (random intermittent reinforcement)

--The employee is given a choice of the reward (cash equals freedom).

Activities that are rewarded in this manner will be repeated; management is getting the maximum return for their money.

There are a number of ways the grocery bag reward system can be managed and varied:

--Note that there are no $2 bills in the bag yet the average draw from the bag will be two dollars (total dollar value divided by the number of bills).

--Budgets are controlled by maintaining the mix of bills that are immediately replaced with bills of the same denomination.
--Poker chips can be substituted for bills and can easily change the average draw.
--Different activities can have different draw values. For example, daily attendance may be valued at three draws and attendance for five days in a row valued at 15 draws; or up selling a customer on a Friday might have double the draw value of other days.
--Rather than poker chips or bills in a grocery bag, use a wheel-of-fortune, or any other simple and quick game that generates a random (but controlled) output.
--In addition to money, prizes can be anything imaginable: time off, casual day, gift cards, parking spots, etc.

Large Scale Deployment

Imagine the challenge of running this in a call center of 100, 500 or 1,000 agents, many with different responsibilities and goals. How are attendance, adherence, attrition, upselling, quality scores, and other micro-goals captured and reported quickly? How are payroll and taxes updated? How are different games created and managed? How are prizes and reward levels determined?

Snowfly’s (News - Alert) incentive management program automates these tasks. Snowfly is an Internet based incentive program with the effectiveness, power, flexibility and responsiveness to significantly improve your key performance indicators (KPI’s). Most Snowfly contact center customers see immediate and sustained improvements in KPI’s of at least 20 percent while spending about two hour’s value of labor per month per employee, an excellent ROI.

(Bob Cowen is a representative for Snowfly)