The How and Why of Call Center Employee Incentives

Two words reveal the secret of successful employee incentive programs: feedback and reinforcement. These are two of the four core tenets driving behaviors that affect KPI’s. As a child and young adult you learned that continuous feedback guided you in your pursuit of learning. You received regular grades for homework, tests, reports and the dreaded final exams, thus conditioning you to expect continuous feedback. Once out of school and into the workplace, continuous feedback abruptly stopped and changed to quarterly goals, MBO’s and annual reviews that often have very little relevance to your daily tasks and challenges. Now you’re a manager; you need to motivate and incentivize your team to improve a myriad of KPI’s that could make or break your career and company. You may have been doing this for awhile or perhaps you’re new at it. How do you do it or improve what you’re already doing? The first word: feedback. You and your team were conditioned for continuous positive feedback through your educational processes; feedback is craved because it’s emotionally rewarding. I injected the word “positive” because a note from your teacher praising your work was more desirable and elicited more renewed efforts than a negative one. Just because you’re out of school doesn’t mean that continuous positive feedback is no longer a powerful motivator to you or your staff. In fact, look at the continuous positive feedback received by those who play games either on-line or with a specialized gaming system such as a PlayStation, Xbox or Wii. They generate and receive positive feedback multiple times per minute, talk about “continuous,” wow! Because anything that provides positive feedback will be repeated, it’s no surprise that employee incentive programs running longer than six months produce nearly twice the results of shorter duration programs. Successful incentive programs do not have an end-date, although they should be frequently evaluated and updated. Lesson number one is to use “continuous positive feedback.” It’s the emotion that gets activities started. Take large activities and break them down into their precedent or smallest measurable components. Then, reward those activities continuously, as they occur; doing so will capitalize on the motivational affects that we’ve learned during the first twenty years (or so) of our lives. Depending upon the tasks and number of employees this may be laborious but the bottom line results are well worth the effort. An added bonus is that morale follows performance. The second word: reinforcement. Did you know that more than 85% of the revenue earned by Las Vegas comes from slot machines? Imagine if your HR department tasked you to write a job description for a slot machine operator. Here is what you might write “You will sit before a machine, drop a piece of metal into a slot and pull a lever over and over and over again. The wages are that you will slowly lose all of the money you brought to work.” Let me expand on the term “reinforcement” and precede it with the term “random intermittent.” The magic of Las Vegas is “random intermittent reinforcement.” It’s one of the most powerful motivators in existence when you realize the amount of money that is taken TO Las Vegas and stays there. I’m not suggesting that your incentive program include gambling. It’s a losing proposition and I do not recommend offering lottery tickets in an employee incentive program. However you have witnessed the power of “random intermittent reinforcement” when you have a reward that depends on spin-the-wheel, take a ticket from a fish bowl or select a sealed envelope. Lesson number two is to use random intermittent reinforcement. This is the emotion that keeps activities going. It should be utilized in every employee incentive program for every activity, not just at special times or for special events. Injecting a game with a random but controlled result in the reward process also gives additional reinforcement to the activity. Yes, your traditional top performers will remain the top earners. The primary benefit will be to improve those who are not at the top and to insure that the new-hires are successful and do not become discouraged (you know where that slippery slope leads). In the first paragraph I mentioned four core tenets. Here are the other two. Pay incentives immediately and separately from payroll. The more closely you tie the reward with the activity, the greater the reinforcement. The fourth tenet is to provide a choice of desirable rewards. Believe it or not, one third of incentive programs produce negative results. A sure-fire way to kill an incentive program is to offer merchandise that the employee sees as overpriced. While not overtly saying so, they ask why your company wasted the incentive reward they earned on something that could have been purchased on the Internet for 30% to 50% less. Our most recent survey of reward redemptions showed that 88% of the values of our client’s employee’s redemptions were to put funds onto a Visa or MasterCard debit card. Not surprisingly, many of the employees waited until October, November and December to spend the funds they had accumulated on their cards. An advisory: home agents. Having agents working from home is achieving critical mass (long overdue in my opinion). While this is good news overall, there is one major loss. You lose the highly motivating power of being part of a team and the feeling of camaraderie. If you are using or considering using home agents, be extra diligent about following the advice above. How much to spend: two hours of labor cost per FTE per month. So what is the right amount? Somewhere there must be the magic number that is not too much and not too little. I call it the “goldilocks” amount because it’s just right to elicit the optimum performance improvement for the money. Whether your agents are inbound, outbound, blended, customer service or sales, we would all like to improve major contact center metrics: schedule adherence, attendance, tardiness, sales per hour, dollars collected, first call resolution, quality scores, better data accuracy, reduced early-stage turnover and others. Yet we face the conundrum of spending too much or too little. When an incentive program is properly designed and administered, we have seen that KPI’s can easily be improved by a minimum of 20% when spending two hours worth of labor cost per FTE per month. We have also seen that spending more than 3% of payroll does not generate incremental effort. Therefore, my rule of thumb (works with all currencies) is the “two hour” rule. If spending $12 per hour for labor, plan on spending around $24 per month for each FTE. To me, that’s an excellent ROI which even the most tight fisted CFO should heartily endorse. Source: The Call Center times

Life of a call center agent

Working in a call center firm is very decisive much more to those operators. On the part of workers like me and anybody else we know that this is not a lifetime career for us but because of the sudden job popularity, people here are encouraged to work instead of working outside boarder. On the other hand, for those operators who are investing time, effort and patience to run a business like this, they need to provide everything to keep it effective, sensible and profitable of course.

More often than usual, call center contribute or supply larger amount of employment almost every quarter of the year. The main reason why entrepreneurs chose to outsource here in the Philippines, because both big and small business centers are into job seekers for the reason that employment here is somewhat available. Filipinos wants to broaden their skills and knowledge and that could only mean that we can do multi tasking job.

Call Center life here in the Philippines is measured as the practical work these days. When it comes to accessibility, Filipinos are highly capable because of being flexible. There are people working even part time for this kind of job while studying. Reasons why foreign countries want to outsource here because they believed on the talents , intelligence and lifestyles of some Asian countries especially here in the Philippines.

Everyday you will see numbers of applicants here in Ortigas looking for job, job that could possibly give them wondrous experiences. The moment you get into this kind of work you will see for yourself the different changes that could happen. Late at night hangouts, taking advantage of spiffs and commissions, new colleagues, and interesting working environment are some of those changes. For people spend their time to this kind of profession, some find it motivating for them for their personal growth.

source: callcenterphilippinesblog.com

Philippines Call Center Hub

Philippine call center industry, Call Centers are fast spreading in the country. Now, they are being considered as one of best contributors in the economic growth in the Philippines and still foreseen to be helping the country in the coming years.

Call center services in the Philippines covers both inbound (inquiries,help desk, technical support, payment authorization, order taking,complaints handling, directory assistance, among others) and outbound (telemarketing, telesurvey, telecollection, sales verification, sales dispatch, reactivation of lapsed accounts, among others) services. Solutions being offered include: customer relations management, partner relationship management, quality management systems, and loyalty management programs. These are all being completed or accomplished via phone, fax, email, chat and web collaboration tools. Approximately 89 call centers collectively employs around 100-120,000 people in the Philippines and that number increases by several hundreds each month.

The industry rapidly grows every year. And this new industry catches the attention of investors and analysts alike. Three prime locations in the Philippines are considered to shelter most call centers in the country such as Manila, Cebu, and Baguio. Presently, there are millions square feet of office spaces available still in the Philippines. All being viewed for more call center spaces, somehow indicating that the industry is still on its peak. A lot of investors prefer the Philippines as a base for their offshore customer service facilities. Because culturally, Filipinos are more Westernized than their Asian neighbors.

Aside from the fact that the Filipinos are known for their fluency in the English language, there also many skilled professionals in the field of the Information Technology. Cost-wise, wages are typically one fifth of that in the U.S.Local communication and electricity. Housing costs are almost 49% lower compared to the U.S. rates. Foreign companies that are now outsourcing programming and business processes to the Philippines have an estimate of 29 to 40% business cost savings; 14 to 30% on call center services and 34 to 50% on application systems software development, resulting to much more profit and higher ranking among its competitors. In 2010, it has been forecasted that global demand for outsourcing services will reach US$170 billion, and with the Philippines keeping up with India, theyll sure to gain more part in the call center industry all around the world.

source: www.isnare.com