I came back from vacation to discover I had racked up nearly 600 e-mails in my inbox.  I wasn’t sure where to start.  Should I look at my meeting invitations first, or clear out the spam?  Overwhelmed, I found myself reading e-mails haphazardly, picking up in the middle of conversations and getting confused.  Only later did I realize my fatal flaw – I tried to focus on everything at once, and ended up focusing on all the wrong things.

I see similarities between my situation and that of the frontline.  Measured and held accountable to 15, 30, or even upwards of 50+ metrics ranging from average hold time to FCR to adherence, frontline reps are inundated with long lists of their data points and trends. 

The result is that the staff feels micromanaged, and don’t know which metric to pay attention to.  They can’t focus on everything at once – there is simply too much.  So, they figure out which metric to focus on in an ad hoc way – maybe it was the topic of the weekly team meeting or it happened to be discussed during a coaching session.  And like me, sometimes they will focus on all the wrong things – metrics that are of lower importance to the customer or company, while ignoring critical metrics.

The larger point is that focusing on one metric at a time isn’t likely going to improve performance.  Metrics impact each other, but it’s tough to see the bigger picture when you are stuck in the weeds. 

But the right answer probably isn’t to drastically cut the number of metrics on your frontline rep’s scorecard.  Companies who have moved their thinking forward here recognize that all the metrics on the scorecard measure important elements of frontline behavior to some extent.

Instead, these companies find ways to prioritize and present metrics to drive the right type of rep behaviors: 

• Metric prioritization, not reduction: One financial services company ranks metrics based on effect to the company’s business results (so, things like revenue, efficiency, customer loyalty) and level of frontline rep control.  They prioritize things that have a big effect on the business and are largely within frontline rep’s control.  They have a host of metrics they continue to track, but reps know which small set of metrics to focus on first.
• Clear graphical presentation matters: The same company presents these metrics not as a list of data, but in a graphical chart format.  The roll metrics up into cost, sales, and customer satisfaction data points, then map them on a chart based on importance (calculated from the prioritization) and current rep performance.  They also have separate charts that break out individual metrics in each of the three sections along the same axis as the top-level chart.  The graphs immediately show the reps where they need to improve – at both a higher and a more discrete level.
• Factor in the customer: More and more, the customer’s point of view matters in terms of call quality.  How about holding reps accountable to things like customer experience or customer effort scores?  Companies are now more heavily weighing quality-based metrics like customer survey scores based on their impact to call quality, moving productivity metrics to a ‘guardrail’ status only. 

People behave based on how they are measured.  To ensure frontline reps strive for high quality customer interactions, we need to make sure they are focusing on the right metrics.

I’d love to hear from you.  How have you redesigned your frontline rep scorecard recently?

CCC members, see how Toyota Financial Services and Canadian Tire Financial Services revamped their rep’s scorecards to improve results.  Or peek at rep-level scorecards and metrics from 44 other companies.

Related posts:

1. Snowed In…and Moonlighting as a Remote Rep
2. The Quality Assurance Fairness Debate
3. Stuck Between a Rock and a Quality Assurance Hard Place
4. FCR: How Accurate Is Your Data?
5. Not All Seedlings Turn into High-Performers