The Total Performance Management Forum

By Steve Murtagh, Total Performance Management Practice Leader

If you have had the opportunity to obtain any formal training in quality management, you are familiar with the concepts of “effectiveness” and “efficiency”. While efficiency is concerned with “doing things right”, its partner is all about making sure that you are “doing the right things” in the first place. This could not be a more critical distinction. The business landscape is littered with the bleached bones of companies that were unmatched at doing things their customers did not value at peak efficiency. Henry Ford’s decision to produce only a single model automobile in a single color is widely credited with giving Alfred Sloan the opportunity to establish General Motors. Consumers were willing to pay for choices, and efficiency alone was just not effective.

When “performance management” is discussed in the context of contact center operations, the focus is often exclusively on efficiency. Reducing costs, automation, shifting effort onto the end-user customer, controlling staff growth and doing more with less are the kinds of things most likely on the table when performance management is the topic. But effectiveness is every bit as important for the contact center’s success and, in this day of offshore outsourcing, perhaps even its survival. Some years ago the Gartner Group published a finding that for every $1 reduction in the direct expenses of a company’s formal support operations there was as much as a $3 increase in the overall actual cost of support throughout the enterprise. Clearly here is a case where blind devotion to “cost reduction” and efficiency is ill advised.

The Total Performance Management (TPM) approach takes a broader and more holistic view of what it takes to assure a contact center’s long term success. To be sure, optimizing operational efficiency remains a core component of the TPM model. Wasting resources is never a good idea. But TPM also requires a deep understanding of the value of everything that the contact center does (to both the enterprise and its customers), and the measurements, analytics and communication processes to ensure that the value is realized.

Unlike the typical efficiency-focused performance management methods, TPM is comprised of three equally important components:

1. Effectiveness and Goal Setting
   • Customer Expectations - Understanding exactly what your customers need and want, and how important it is to them.
   • Customer Experience – Knowing how your customers feel about your enterprise and your products and services, based upon their interactions with you.
   • Strategy Articulation – Establishing objectives and strategies that are aligned with the expectations and requirements.
   
2. Efficiency and Change Management
   • Diagnostics – Assessing your existing environment for alignment with business goals and strategy and opportunities for more efficient operations.
   • Opportunity Analysis – Evaluating opportunities for improvement and/or enhancement, understanding the business case for each, prioritizing.
   • Program Development and Project Management – Implementation of selected projects, technologies, process improvements, new services, etc.
   
3. Measurement and Feedback
   • Metrics – Implementing prescriptive processes that provide ongoing measurement of progress against goals.
   • Analysis – Taking appropriate action to identify and resolve problem areas and spotlight emerging opportunities.
   • Action – Identification of successes and failures, understanding what is working and what is not; revisit Step 1.

Think of these as the three legs of the performance management stool. While it is certainly possible to sit on a two (or even a one) legged stool, you will find that you spend much more of your time balancing than you do sitting.

In the next few issues of iLink, we will explore each of these facets of TPM in more detail, and understand how you can apply them to make your own customers more successful in their contact center operations.

Total Performance Management ™ is InterVox’s integrated approach to understanding what customers want and aligning contact center objectives, processes, resources and behaviors to provide those services consistently and efficiently.