KEEP: The Essential Ingredient to KPI Performance Success

17 September, 2019

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KEEP: The Essential Ingredient to KPI Performance Success

Belize, where our contact centers are located, is home to Marie Sharp’s, a well-known hot sauce company. While not as popular as Tabasco, the company, named for its founder, produces products made with a unique secret carrot-based habanero pepper recipe.

To ensure Transparent BPO achieves the goals our clients expect, we also have a “secret recipe”  that contains an essential ingredient to KPI performance success, which many companies are missing.

What’s this mysterious ingredient? It’s called KEEP, an acronym for Knowledge and Expertise Enhancement Plan, a unique employee performance improvement program that is the brainchild of Jon Williams, Transparent’s Director of Operations.

Williams developed the concept based on his 16 years of experience as an employee in some of the biggest BPO companies in the industry.

“I worked for some large companies, all of which had some form of action plan built around metrics,” he says. “I took the best of where I’ve been and melded the elements together into a hybrid plan that gives us the greatest opportunity to be successful for our clients.”

KEEP is a formal improvement plan for any level of employee, from agent to team lead to operations manager. Participants meet in a structured setting to discuss performance, KPIs, and the behaviors that drive them and then collaborate on a plan to move forward.

“The purpose of KEEP is about getting everyone to perform better,” he says. “It is a mutual commitment to take steps to improve in areas where it is determined changes can and should be made, including KPIs and behaviors.”

A focus on behaviors, not just KPIs, is one facet that distinguishes KEEP from performance improvement plans Williams used in the past.

“While every company I worked for had an action plan, it was focused strictly coaching for metrics,” says Williams. “With KEEP, we marry metrics and behaviors and track both over a long period.”

According to Williams, metrics are outputs of behaviors agents have with any transaction. He cites, as an example, one KPI that nearly every contact center has in common: average handle time (AHT).

“You can’t coach to AHT itself,” notes Williams. “Some behavior the agent is displaying affects it. Maybe the person doesn’t have good call control, or there is too much small talk, or they have trouble knowing how to navigate the tools to find the answer quickly. With KEEP, the agent and team lead create action plans together around their observation of the agent’s behaviors, and the agent takes responsibility for making improvements.”

Another unique feature of KEEP is that unlike similar programs, it focuses on the individual agent performance, not just the team.

“KEEP allows us to drill down to the individual level rather than being limited to group-level reports,” he says. “We build plans around the agent because everyone is different. We want performance plans to be flexible, customized, and personalized to each agent’s needs.”

Regarding the value KEEP provides clients, Williams cites two factors, which he says every company should be able to ask of its outsourcing partner: consistent performance and continuous improvement.

“In the outsourcing world, you can see the numbers and improvement but don’t really know what’s going on, what actions are taking place, or that your advice is being heard,” Williams says.

“With KEEP, if a client wants to know how an agent is performing, they can go to the form and see the record of consistency and constant improvement right there. That gives them peace of mind that growth is occurring — and that’s exactly what KEEP provides.”

If your KPI performance is lacking the consistency and constant improvement you need, we have the missing ingredient essential for success: KEEP. Contact us to learn more.