GUIDE

End Performance Rollercoaster: A Leader’s Guide

Trusted by leading enterprises:

Common frontline challenges such as high error rates, knowledge gaps, fluctuating performance, low morale, and high attrition rates have two things in common: they result in a poor customer experience and are all resolvable by driving consistency within the organization.

Performance consistency is critical to organizational success. In this guide, we’ll cover:

What performance consistency is (and why it matters)
The consequences of inconsistency
Real-life instances of consistency accelerating growth
Driving a culture of consistent performance
Summary and key takeaways

Guide Teaser

Introduction – Frontline Performance Pitfalls

“I’ve been worried about overall team performance and whether we will meet our SLAs.”

“Our attrition rates have risen over the past year, including managers. It really is a challenge.” 

“Our quality scores are okay, but our CSAT is declining – something isn’t right.” 

Does any of this sound familiar?

These situations have two things in common:

They all have adverse outcomes for the organization – longer handle times, missed opportunities, and, at the end of the day, a poor customer experience. This leads to higher costs, reputational damage, and client and customer churn.

Each of these situations is resolvable by enabling performance consistency.

This guide covers why performance consistency is critical to organizational success and the strategies leading global enterprises use to achieve performance consistency across their frontline teams. We’ll also dive into the consequences of inconsistency for leaders, why maintaining consistency is hard, what leaders are doing, and a few tips for creating a scalable culture of consistency.

Defining Performance Consistency

Performance consistency is defined as maintaining a steady level of performance over time. This delivers results and quality at predictable and reliable levels, avoiding large fluctuations in results.

For example, someone training for a marathon wouldn’t try to run all 26 miles on the weekend. That would lead to fluctuating performance – and injuries, which would hinder progress. They would instead start by running shorter distances several times per week, gradually adding to their mileage while cross-training (swimming, cycling, or strength training) for overall fitness and injury reduction. This more productive approach enables a sustainable, efficient journey to reach a goal.

The same principle applies to the workplace – which is not entirely unlike running a marathon. Like a marathon, organizations have consistent long-term goals and must help employees develop productive habits and practices with incremental increases that are sustainable over the long term.

We found that by letting agents know what their goals and results are, supporting them with on-the-job training and coaching, and recognizing their efforts, they help us drive improvement.
– Global Vice President of Operations

Consistency = Customer and Employee Trust and Loyalty

Consistency in policies, processes, and overall service gives customers confidence. And when customers are confident that they will consistently have a great experience, they remain loyal. This drives strong results, such as customer retention, high CSAT, and NPS.

Consistently motivated, engaged, empathetic, and well-trained employees are the key to earning that confidence. By instilling consistency in the employee experience, organizations will see substantial results, including:

Higher motivation and engagement
Increased productivity and performance
Moving the middle
Decreased burnout
Reduced attrition

Finally, consider this:

60%: The percentage of consumers who say they have purchased from a brand solely based on the service they expect to receive.
80%: According to Gartner, this is the percentage of organizations that expect to compete with others based in CX.
5%: Forrester reports that this amount of customer retention improvement can increase profitability by 25%.

And this is where an organizational strategy comes into play.

The Power of Consistency

Consistency is what drives engagement and accelerates growth. And growth can take some surprising forms. One common success story from our customers is where they see growth, which usually starts with their middle-performing employees. Some real-life results:

One BPO who sought to improve average AHT saw a marked improvement in handle times after implementing the Centrical platform, starting with middle performers who regularly engaged with the platform. Thanks to enhanced training and the gamified aspect, middle performers moved into the top spots, with low performers who also engaged steadily moving to the middle.

A North America-based financial services organization reported improvements among engaged employees in their debt collections department. Those who consistently engaged with the platform saw their promise to pay and revenue metrics vastly improve. Those who did not engage with the platform delivered an inconsistent performance and saw their metrics sink……