What are your Best Practices?
* Who are your high performers?
* Do you know what practices are making them successful?
* Can other team members benefit from their skills?
* Are they engaged in discussions about the success of the
business?
One way you can answer these questions is by conducting a Best
Practices Study.
Best Practices Studies
These studies can be defined as inquiries into the skills and
methods of your high performers to recognize their achievements,
document their methods and skills and then share this
information with team members to improve overall performance.
The responses generated from your study may hold the solutions
to a variety of team challenges in the Call Center. As a team
leader, you can approach these studies by conducting short,
one-on-one interviews, focus groups, or surveys.
By simply asking questions in any of these formats related to
individual best practices, you can achieve the following:
* Identify employee's good behaviors
* Recognize and reward high performers
* Engage employees in business-related discussions
* Document what is being done well and what works
* Generate training and non-training solutions
The key to a successful Best Practices Study is to work from a
position of appreciation - valuing the employee, their
performance and their input.
What's the point?
A Best Practices Study serves two purposes. First, it provides
an excellent resource for identifying team needs or closing the
performance gap. When evaluating team performance, you will find
team members at every level. Best practices studies identify the
high performers and the behaviors and habits that make them
effective. Management, trainers and even the high-performing
team members can then work together to recreate these actions or
behaviors for lower performers. The high performer's
contributions to the study generate ideas for methods of
improvement for low performers. In short, the Best Practices
Study becomes a solution to performance issues.
The second purpose of such studies relates to employee
appreciation, recognition and reward. Because you are
collaborating with your team's most valuable resource - the high
performers and the team members themselves - you acknowledge and
validate their performance. When documented properly and acted
upon, employees' responses to best practices studies hold
powerful resolutions to a variety of business problems.
Implementing these solutions shows high performers their value
to the team and to the organization and involves them in making
improvements in an active way.
What are the steps?
Identify the Need
To conduct a Best Practices Study you must first identify the
need. What is it that you want to learn? You may be interested
in finding out more about a specific behavior, such as Average
Handle Time, or you can approach the study in broader terms of
overall excellent performance.
Identify the Top Performers
Once you have determined what you would like the focus of the
study to be, identify your top performers in this area. Who are
the individuals who consistently meet or exceed expectations in
an area of performance? If you are working with a large group
choose 33% of the top performers to interview. After
interviewing 33% of your group you will probably start to hear
similar answers.
Prepare Questions
Now that you know what you want to learn, and who you want to
interview, how are you going to get the answers that you are
looking for? Your questions are the tools that generate the
solutions. Think of the questions as the keys that unlock the
secrets to improving performance. Keep in mind the purpose of
your questions as you write them and that is to value the
employee's experience and generate positive responses.
Sample Questions (used to determine best practices for customer
retention):
* What do you think makes you successful as a retention
representative?
* What qualities do you possess that add to your success in this
position?
* If you were to give one piece of advice to a new
representative what would it be?
* What skills do you use on a regular basis that make you most
effective?
Conduct the Interview
The safer your interviewees feel about the process the more
honest their answers will be. For short, one-on-one interviews,
secure a room, be prepared to take notes and make the meeting
conversational and friendly. For focus groups, encourage
participation, write answers on a flip chart for all
participants to see and keep the conversation focused. When
conducting surveys explain the purpose and what you hope to
accomplish with the findings. Ensure that all the survey
questions are clear or that you are available to answer
questions about the survey.
Review Material and Take Action
Once you have conducted all of your interviews or surveys and
compiled your notes, review your notes thoroughly and extract
the best practices. You may find more success if you involve
other managers or supervisors in the process.
Sample questions (to use when working with other team leaders):
* What behaviors are consistent with many of our high performers?
* What advice did they offer to improve performance for newer
team members?
* How can we turn their suggestions into methods and implement
those practices?
* Who resources are needed for the implementation?
Finally, incorporate high performers' practices into training
strategies and apply your Best Practices Study results to
coaching lower-performing team members.
Now that you have an overview, of how to conduct a Best Practice
Study, give it a try in your Call Center and reap the many
rewards. Your high performers will feel appreciated and valued,
your low performers will improve skills and the overall team or
department will function with more efficiency and success.