CONTACT CENTER CULTURAL METRICS

The board and senior management want proof that their investment in cultural changes is paying off. Could you show me the numbers? Culture is challenging for two reasons. First, it is a soft or invisible concept, not concrete like average talk time. Second, it represents behaviors, the collection of behaviors of the group, not of one individual.

When the right metrics are selected, you can be confident that the investment is paying off, that the culture is under control, that folks are being held accountable for specific elements of the cultural change, and that the plan is constantly being adjusted, corrected, and tweaked for performance. Any deterioration in culture will be noticed and rectified immediately.

Measuring the invisible may be elusive, but it is not impossible. Being able to zero in on the status of your culture before it takes a turn for the worst allows you to fix the problems before the worst happens. Few companies measure and manage culture, yet everyone screams when the lovely warm and fuzzy culture you once had disappears. Culture is something that can occur. If you are lucky, it will be an efficient and productive culture. Many organizations are not so fortunate. Culture is mainly based on the values of the owner or top management. Still, culture can be engineered to be a culture you desire with a plan, some guidance, someone leading the initiative, and commitment from the management team.

The first step in measuring the culture is to ensure that agents know and understand the contact center's values. Most sites have a fancy list of words on a poster they supposedly live by, but no one sees them in action, and the behaviors are rarely consistent with the values. There is a disconnect between the value statements and the behaviors. This needs to be reconnected before you can begin measuring anything. You can’t measure what people don’t understand.

Self-Assessment can be conducted in a couple of ways. One way is through an anonymous survey where employees can evaluate their behavior. Making it anonymous will get you honest feedback, and when people are not afraid of the consequences of sharing how they think and feel, you will elicit the truth. After all that is what you want. You can’t fix shortcomings if you don’t know what they are.

Examples of some possible questions include:
– I feel proud to work at xyz contact center
– The contact center has an inspiring message that I understand and embrace
– I believe in top leadership
– I understand what is expected of me
– I understand how my work contributes to the company’s goals
– I believe my supervisor provides honest feedback and cares about my professional development
– I believe employees are held accountable when standards are not met
– I believe the policy and procedures allow me to do my job without too many obstacles
– I feel that I am well compensated for my work

The second way to gather this information is through focus groups. Again, hire an outside facilitator to get honest answers. A trained facilitator will ask the questions and facilitate discussions, providing more insights than a survey. Either way, anonymity is the key.

You may already have many of these tools in your contact center. Now you can use these tools in a whole new light. You can evaluate the cultural progress of your contact center by looking at the behavioral shifts, opinion and attitude shifts, and employees' perceptions. The point is that you don’t necessarily need a notable “culture” metric. You want to view the metrics you have with your “culture awareness glasses” on.

Here are a few select tools that are popular in today's call/contact center: 

– Employee Opinion Surveys
– Internal Audits
– Performance Scorecards
– Customer Research
– Internal Customer Surveys
– HR monthly reports
– Market research
– Contact Center Metrics Reporting

At the end of the day, when the culture supports employees, people are productive, and everyone is generally happy, contact center metrics should improve. Overall performance should improve when the culture shifts. When culture is the barrier to progress, metrics stagnate. When you remove those barriers and progress flows, the metrics take care of themselves.

Actual culture change requires radical behavior change over time. Depending on the size of your organization and the depth of the changes being made, it can take several months to years. The new behaviors need to be entrenched in the management team’s DNA so that they are demonstrated every moment of every day. Observation is the best indicator of change. Notice what customers and employees do and say, and notice the shifts.

From the Customer Perspective – Do you hear customers commenting positively on the small changes? Are customers making positive comments on the customer satisfaction surveys? Can you document how many positive remarks vs. how many negative comments? Can you compare those comments to last year or before the culture initiative?

Employee Behavior – Behavior speaks louder than words. Do you notice employees acting differently than before? Taking different actions than previously?

Employee Perceptions: Do you hear language different from before, indicating a shift in mindset, attitude, and opinion?

Note the attitude and behavioral shifts and take the time to reward and recognize those individuals; the culture will continue to propagate.

If you are not getting the results you are looking for from your cultural initiatives, here are a few places to double check:

Leadership: Someone on the leadership team isn’t on board. Culture is a reflection of the leadership team. A reflection of the commitment, values, and behaviors modeled consistently. Who on your team isn’t modeling and embracing the desired culture?

Clarity: The cultural initiative lacks clarity on its mission, vision, and values. If the initiative comes across like the “flavor of the month,” it is seen as meaningless. Values must be clearly understood and demonstrated each day to become meaningful. The mission and vision must be connected and clear. The mission statement posted on the wall but never referenced becomes empty words. Do you need to fine-tune your mission, vision, and values? You determine that your mission, vision, and values are solid; do you need to make them more meaningful? Have you communicated them in a way everyone understands them?

Lack of Buy-In: Where in the organization is the cultural initiative stagnating? Look at every level of the contact center and every department. Is it one person or a group that doesn’t see the value in the change initiative? Is someone about to lose his or her power as a result? Who has dug their heels so deep that they can’t get out of the way and cooperate?

Poor Implementation: Be honest with yourself. If the word on the floor is “this is another flavor of the month thing,” the implementation will go sideways. Or was there any implementation at all? Just commanding the initiative isn’t enough. Proper implementation requires buy-in at all levels, modeling the behavior every moment of the day and living and breathing the mindset and behavior of the contact center values.

Changing culture isn’t an easy task. Long time employees have old ways of doing things, and old ways of thinking, and those things die hard. It’s not impossible to change the culture, it takes daily commitment. Never letting your foot off the gas. Model the behavior you desire every moment. Being honest and admitting you must terminate a non-believer. Non-believers degrade progress. Your stick-to-it-ness will pay off, and your contact center will flourish because of the commitment. It will be the talk of the town, where everyone wants to work.