Wallboards are a familiar site in contact centres. No matter how large the business operation, wallboards displaying a dashboard of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used to inform contact centre operators, supervisors, and managers of how well the business is performing.
Despite the widespread use, industry research suggests up to 12% of contact centre managers are of the opinion that wallboards may have a negative effect because they are a constant source of stress.
With the skills gap making it difficult for companies to recruit, burnout and employee turnover rates are more critical than ever, and it is important for contact centres to be sensitive to the impacts of stress.
Continually reminding agents of targets may well cause anxiety for some; however, for others it may be seen as ‘gamification’, fitting with their competitive personalities and driving them to perform better.
In this view, it might be easy to say that those that find wallboards a source of stress might well be in the wrong job. But it’s not that simple. Contact centre agents need a variety of personal attributes, including patience, empathy, diligence, attention to detail, and so on.
Such qualities may not be incompatible with having a competitive personality., but the fact remains, a highly competitive person may prioritise being an uber-performer above everything else. This may manifest itself as compromising service to customers and creating friction among agents within contact centre teams.
A mix of personality types and wallboards are facts of life in the contact centre, so it requires a little thought to design a wallboard so that the information displayed, minimises stressful impacts on individual agents and teams.
Pitting individual agents against one another by displaying their individual key performance data may be a key source of stress. This may be especially true where agents are working in a centralised office.
However, when working remotely using a cloud-based VoIP contact centre platform to connect a distributed workforce of agents or advisors, displaying their personal KPIs to them may be instrumental in preventing them from feeling isolated.
Overcoming lockdowns through hybrid working has been an important capability for many organisations since the advent of Covid, but home working can be a double-edged sword. It may well be great for work-life balance considerations, however, it can be detrimental to productivity.
Some typical personal performance KPI data to present to agents working remotely that are useful for maintaining motivation include:
Larger contact centres may be able to group agents into teams. Creating small teams can help overcome a demoralising ‘typing pool’ effect. Agent or advisor teams also allow for logical organisational units, which could be under specific supervisors or team leaders and managers. Teams could also be used to provide coverage where long operational hours require agents to work in shifts.
Ultimately, organising into teams allows for efficiency, and unity which often improves productivity. Many businesses with contact centre operations may have outbound campaigning running in tandem with inbound call operations. Outbound teams are likely to be a natural fit for advisors with more competitive personality types.
Designing wallboard data so that it focuses on group performance promotes the team ethic of everyone working together without highlighting the performances of individuals.
Some good team KPIs that can focus a group of agents or advisors include:
Wallboards don’t just need to limit their content to real-time performance. You might wish to compare current KPIs with those from previous months to show trends and performance over time.
Aside from performance, wallboards can also be used to display many other pieces of relevant information that may be useful when dealing with calls, including:
You could of course, go the whole hog and treat it as a general notice board for many other things, as almost an extension of a company intranet – remember those?
It can be easy to put too much information on your wallboards and make it too fussy. So, it is well worth testing the mix of information displayed and layouts to see which ones work best, survey agents for feedback and adjust the wallboard design appropriately.
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