Are You Measuring Team Performance Effectively? 10 Tips to Create Top Performers

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It's true: Team performance reflects the quality of your leadership. Effective call center leaders strive to make every team member a top performer, but for that to happen, you need to define what a top performer is and establish how to measure team performance.

Do you know what your team members are doing, how fast they’re doing it, and whether they’re effectively satisfying your customers? Call metrics and KPIs provide a reliable and objective way to measure team performance while improving customer satisfaction.

If you’re feeling lost or you’re having any doubts about how to measure team performance effectively, we’ve got 10 great tips to help you create top-performing teams.

Why It’s Important to Measure Team Performance

When call volume is high and all team members are actively talking to prospects and customers, it gives the impression that your teams are performing their best. But lots of call activity doesn’t necessarily mean that your teams are productive or efficient. A busy team doesn’t automatically mean that customers and prospects are getting a positive experience.

By measuring team performance objectively, you can set realistic (and reasonable!) individual and team goals.

Analytics enable you to generate informative reports quickly to help you make better decisions for your teams. Call center metrics and KPIs provide an objective way for you to set team goals and measure team performance to ensure a good customer experience.

When your team members aren’t performing their best, customers will leave your brand in a New York minute. Competition is strong, and customer churn is something you want to avoid at all costs.

Overall, by measuring team performance, you’ll improve customer retention, improve the customer experience, and increase revenue.

The Differences Between Individual & Team Performance

Let’s take a look at how individual and team performance help you reach your business goals.

Individual Performance

Just as it sounds, individual employee performance is a type of appraisal that measures each individual’s performance against measurable objectives. An individual performance review and appraisal opens up opportunities for team members and their leaders to share ideas and develop goals collaboratively. During reviews, team members will learn what they need to do specifically to get pay increases, earn bonuses and incentives, and advance within the company.

Team Performance

Individual performance contributes to the overall team performance. By reviewing and appraising team performance, leaders get clarity on each individual’s contribution to the team. Leaders also use team performance appraisals to evaluate progress on team goals, improve team collaboration, and learn how well teams work together to improve the customer experience.

Cohesiveness is a vital ingredient for effective teamwork. The way to achieve cohesiveness is to ensure that each team member performs their assigned tasks efficiently, communicates well with peers, and pitches in whenever necessary.

Despite any differences between individual performance and team performance, it’s important to monitor both.

Why They Both Matter

Simply put, when individuals perform better, so do teams. The benefit of high-performing teams creates competitive advantages for your small business. Systematic and consistent appraisal policies are the key to developing top performers across the company.

To ensure team members perform their best, you need to be crystal clear on expectations. To do this, provide frequent training and skill development opportunities and give them 360-degree feedback on their performance. By carving out regular schedules for appraisals, it’s easier to identify where individual team members are struggling. It also presents opportunities to offer well-deserved praise. It will motivate reps to go the extra distance in exceeding customer expectations with every customer interaction.

If the entire team is failing, it doesn’t mean individual team members aren’t pulling their weight. It could mean that one or more team members aren’t doing well and others are overperforming as they try to pick up the slack.

Individual and team performance appraisals matter because they provide valuable insight into team dynamics and the inner workings of teams. Such insights shed light on how your employees contribute individually and collectively to your call center’s success.

What Makes Each of Them Unique

Every individual you hire brings unique skills and abilities to your team. That said, regardless of how skilled or experienced a sales rep or support agent might be, there are always new skills to learn and new challenges to tackle. The best way to tap into each individual’s strengths and identify areas that need improvement is to offer mentorship and coaching while be clear on their tasks and responsibilities. From there, you can set customized goals and monitor their progress based on milestones for specific tasks and their overall performance.

Each team also has a personality and dynamic of its own. That can be a good thing or a bad thing. What characteristics reflect a top-performing team? All team members commit to showing up on time, be willing to take initiative, and practice good communication. It also requires team members to be willing to pass the baton and rely on their peers when customers need more expertise than they can provide.

At the end of the day, top-performing teams generate the type of power and momentum that solve problems quickly and keep customers happy.

9 Metrics for Team Performance

The key to getting the best performance from your teams is to properly measure their performance. The way to do that is by focusing on team performance metrics and utilizing call center software.

What metrics should you consider to measure team performance? Here are 9 things you could consider tracking:

1. Average call length

2. Number of calls answered

3. Average speed of answer

4. Average wait times

5. Number of missed calls

6. Average amount of time to return a missed call

7. Conversion rate

8. First call resolution

9. Customer call frequency

Quality assurance software leverages AI, automation, transcription, and your cloud phone system software to produce real-time metrics. These metrics empower reps to evaluate themselves and improve their own performance with every call. Metrics also give leaders objective data to assess individual and team performance and inform decision-making in the call center.

Here are some popular quality assurance software programs to consider adding to your call center along with some attributes:

• Enthu — Speeds up the call QA process by up to 10x.

• EvaluAgent — Improves the productivity of quality assurance teams by 58%.

• Klaus — Gets new reps up to speed 2x faster.

• MaestroQA — Grades automatically and grades customer interactions across channels.

Why Metrics & KPIs Matter When Setting Team Goals

To set team goals without a systematic plan for achieving them does nothing but set your teams up for failure. Metrics and KPIs give your teams specific areas to work on.

Exactly how do metrics and KPIs work to help set team goals?

Assess punctuality

Meal breaks and periodic mental breaks are necessary to keep teams fresh and alert. Teamwork requires them to be ready to work at the start of the shift and after breaks.

Ensure efficiency

Metrics motivate reps to answer calls faster and problem-solve strategically.

Evaluate productivity

Metrics will tell you whether reps are picking up calls in a timely manner and if they’re handling an appropriate number of calls.

Ensures fairness

Objective data ensures that all team members are participating and they’re being evaluated according to the same standards.

Naturally develops leadership skills

Employees are happiest when they know they have room to advance within the company. Metrics and KPIs give them a roadmap for reaching their career goals.

Improves the customer experience

Highly skilled teams provide a seamless customer experience.

Even leaders who have many years of experience can easily go down the wrong path in their approach to measuring team performance. We’ll look at that next.

What Leaders Get Wrong About Measuring Team Performance

Leaders gain a sense of personal and professional satisfaction when they’ve earned the distinction of leading high-performing teams. In contrast, leaders who struggle to elevate team performance might be their own worst enemy. The problem could simply be in a poor approach or worse, not measuring it at all.

Do any of these issues sound familiar to you?

• Choosing metrics and KPIs that don’t correlate with team goals or the company goals.

• Tracking what reps are doing wrong more than the areas where they excel and contribute.

• Evaluating team member performance based only on the amount of time they’re spending on calls and not allowing time for breaks, after-call work, and updating records.

• Failing to establish rewards and incentives based on objective goals and data.

• Failing to provide the right digital tools to help them achieve their goals.

• Spreading out evaluations too far apart or conducting them inconsistently.

• Using subjective criteria over objective data during performance reviews.

• Hovering over your teams intently and not trusting them to perform according to their training.

Ultimately, your teams will behave based on how you measure their performance. If you don’t have anything concrete to share with them, they’ll end up feeling frustrated and lost.

Next, we’ll review 10 tips for how to avoid that problem.

10 Tips to Improve How You Measure Team Performance

1. Be clear on the overall goals of your organization and share them with your teams.

2. Track your metrics and KPIs for at least a quarter to get a benchmark for goals to reach and surpass.

3. Set clearly defined KPIs (for example, improving first-call resolution rate, reducing wait times, decreasing average time to return a call, etc.).

4. Gather objective data for individuals and teams and leverage it to provide targeted and actionable feedback.

5. Be systematic and consistent in conducting performance reviews.

6. Establish an ongoing training program and incorporate explanations about how you gather and utilize data to evaluate performance.

7. Provide representatives with the appropriate digital tools to measure their own performance during customer calls to enable them to modify their interactions in real-time.

8. Continually refine your scripts in response to data from customer feedback and call data.

9. Leverage data from performance software (automated contests, leaderboards, etc.) and include it in incentive and reward programs.

10. Leverage quality assurance software to analyze large volumes of calls and customer interactions to gather data about problems and trends and identify coaching needs.

Measure Team Performance: 10 Questions to Ask Yourself

Hopefully, this information has you wondering how to change your current methods of measuring team performance to optimize your results. We’ve got some questions to guide your thinking:

1. Are your team members in place and ready to work at the start of the day and after every break?

2. Is your absenteeism rate higher than you’d like?

3. Do you have a clear structure in place for reps to advance within the company based on objective data that measures their skills?

4. Do you have a regular schedule for conducting individual and team performance reviews and do you follow it consistently?

5. Are any of your team members experiencing undue mental fatigue?

6. Do your team members have good attitudes and have a positive outlook regarding their peers?

7. Do your team members feel empowered to solve problems on their own?

8. Do all team members participate equally?

9. Do employees feel the performance review process is fair?

10. Do you need to improve employee engagement?

Before you go and try these team performance metrics, we have one more question for you. How much progress has your small business made since undergoing digital transformation?

In our opinion, your teams will perform best with a unified communication system that includes Aircall and the right apps from the Aircall App Marketplace. It’s the best way to let your call center’s top performers continue doing their jobs well and allows other team members to catch up and improve on their roles.

Published on June 14, 2021.