Strengthening the Circle of Hiring, Training, and Performance
By Marc van Baar, Support Education Manager, Blackbaud

In the technical service and support industry, we all seek methods to increase retention, morale and performance. In an effort to avoid “mis-hires” and to increase performance, Blackbaud has successfully implemented a method of linking recruiting, training and coaching with performance.

There are three key components:

1) Individualized Training Plans (ITPs): We used to have a training goal of 60 hours of training per Support employee per year and found it to be too quantity oriented. Does providing people with 60 hours of training increase performance? Not necessarily; only if the trainings address training needs.

We then shifted to letting managers decide training topics for their employees based on what they hear in employee status meetings and what training needs they perceive themselves. This worked to an extent. Some managers were more pro-active than others in seeking out training for their employees.

In an effort to create the most meaningful training program that increases performance, we introduced individualized training plans. We identify strengths and weaknesses during recruiting, training and coaching.

For example, an employee may have displayed a lack of assertiveness during recruiting. This is then noted in the ITP when the employee is hired. During training, this person scored low in self-help resources test. This is also noted in the ITP. The employee graduates and during coaching sessions, she seems to struggle with disengaging from the client, further reinforcing the lack of assertiveness found during the recruiting process. The manager also mentions that her average call length is on the long side.

The ongoing training coordinator invites this person to a disengaging skills class. In addition, future coaching sessions with this person focus on disengaging skills. Once the employee gets better at disengaging, the training need is removed from the ITP.

2) Linking Meetings: Once a month, recruiters, trainers and coaches meet to discuss the performance of agents on the floor. During this monthly meeting, recruiters, trainers and coaches review performance data with a floor manager. Attendees also present theories and prove or disprove them, using performance data (For example, a recruiter may have a feeling that high applicant test scores don’t automatically translate into higher performance).

3) Client-centric goals for non-agents: Goals for coaches used to be Coach-Centric: They were based on scores assigned by the coaches themselves: For example, “Our agents’ average score needs to be 1.97”.

Coaches now have goals based on the performance of the agents that they coach. This links their coaching sessions to performance. For example, one of the coach’s goals is to “Maintain or increase a client satisfaction rating of 4.57 on the question: The CSA kept the conversation at my level of understanding”. Other examples of linking to performance would be to give recruiters a ramp-up speed goal: New employees reach performance X after Y weeks in the Contact Center.

The Role of Recruiters:

Looking back: Which employees currently are top performers? What is their educational background? What work experience do they have? Recruit more people with similar backgrounds.

Looking forward: Track potential success factors so that you can improve recruiting in the future. We track about 15 potential success factors and these are used by recruiters to prove or disprove theories in Linking meetings.

Recruiter’s role in linking meeting

1. Provide strengths and weaknesses of upcoming hires to trainers and add these to ITPs.
2. Review performance of people currently in training and cross reference with perceived pre-employment weaknesses.
3. Review performance of people that recently graduated.
4. Bi-monthly “Prove your theory” presentation.
5. Brag about recent successes/analyze failures.

The Role of Trainers:

Looking back: All of Blackbaud’s trainers started out as Contact Center agents. To stay in touch with the Contact Center agent position, trainers become coaches after they graduate their most recent students. Trainers coach new employees when they first come on the floor. If no additional coaching is needed, they become escalation points until the next training group comes in (unless they are developing new curriculum).

Looking forward: Trainers capture real life situations during coaching periods and use them in the next round of training.

Trainer’s role in Linking meeting

1. Provide strengths and weaknesses of current trainees back to the recruiter.
2. If a group just graduated, present the graduates’ graduation profiles to the recruiter, coaches and managers. Strengths and weaknesses are noted in these graduation profiles.
3. Review performance of people that recently graduated and cross reference with their graduation profiles.
4. Bi-monthly “Prove your theory” presentation: Is performance on a certain test during training indicative of future performance? 
5. Brag about recent successes/analyze failures.
6. Add training needs from recent graduates to ITPs.

Role of Coaches:

Looking back: We used to rely heavily on coaching via randomly recorded customer contacts. Reviewing recorded contacts takes a while, so the agent received delayed evaluations from coaches she barely knew. Goals for coaches were Coach Centric: They were based on scores assigned by coaches: For example, “Our agents’ average score needs to be 1.97”.

Looking forward: To link coaching with performance, we have drastically changed our approach to coaching. The best way to provide feedback is not after an action has taken place, but right before the action takes place again. For that reason, we now provide side-by-side evaluations in addition to randomly recorded evaluations.

At the beginning of the day, a coach reviews the ITPs for the team she will be observing. She also briefly meets with the manager of the team to see what has changed since the last coaching sessions. What are the performance gaps? By combing the ITPs (which have information dating back to recruiting and training) with managerial feedback, the coach can target her coaching sessions on specific skill gaps. At the end of the day, the coach updates ITPs and meets with the manager again to discuss progress.

We realized that for our coaches to be most effective, our agents would have to feel connected to them. We position our coaches as a resource, not as a silent observer/Quality police: It’s okay for an agent to put a client on hold and to ask the coach for suggestions. We received some pushback from management in this area, after all, wouldn’t that increase the evaluation score? The answer was simple: Sure, but it also increases customer satisfaction!

Another advantage is that our coaches’ job satisfaction has gone up. Our coaches used to feel like the Quality Police. Under our new approach, the agents perceive them as valuable resources.

The Annual Performance objectives for coaches have shifted from directly Coach centric to Agent/Client centric. Since coaches are now able to directly affect the quality of a call, their goals are linked to how well the AGENTS do in the eyes of our customers.

Coaches’ role in a Linking meeting:

1. Learn more about the people that are currently in training
2. Review Graduation profiles for people that recently graduated.
3. Review performance of people that recently graduated and assess what they need to be coached on. For example, if an agent takes fewer contacts than her peers, coaching on “Disengaging from the client” may be needed.
4. Brag about recent successes/analyze failures.
5. Add information to ITPs (this is done after coaching sessions and after Linking Meetings)

Role of the Manager:

The manager’s role in this entire process is to create a culture of linking recruiting, training and coaching to performance.

1) Provide recruiters, trainers and coaches with easy-to-grasp performance data. Initially, I presented them with all the metrics we keep at our Contact center, but this was confusing. I now focus mostly on only one metric. This number is a weighted average of both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of an agent’s performance.

2) It has been helpful to stress to people that disproving a theory can be as valuable as proving a theory. For example, we disproved that certain test scores were a predictor of success. As a result, we are in the process of switching vendors.

3) The process may seem overwhelming for the participants. You can break it down in seven phases to make the process more transparent:

Phase One: Identify your strongest team members based on both quality and quantity metrics, and list their similarities. Did they work in customer service positions before joining your company? Do they have college degrees? Did they hold jobs while in college and/or high school? Do they have a specific educational background? Your goal is to find 10-15 potential success indicators.

Phase Two: Provide your recruiters with spreadsheets to track the potential success indicators for new hires. Also, ask them to rank the new employees from most likely to succeed to least likely to succeed.

Phase Three: Require trainers to track the performance of new hires during training. Based on these metrics, create a second ranking.

Phase Four: After the newly trained agents have been interacting with customers for a set period (such as one month), rank their performance again.

Phase Five: Compare the third ranking to the potential success indicators you captured for the group. For example, are the top performers all college graduates with customer service experience? Provide your recruiters with this data so they have a stronger sense of what to look for when interviewing candidates. If the recruiters’ ranking was significantly different from the final ranking, ensure the recruiters focus on the proven success indicators in the future.

Phase Six: Look into potential discrepancies between the second and third rankings and discuss them with your trainers. For example, agent Jeff is a star on the floor but had a low ranking in training. Learn the reasons for the discrepancy. Perhaps assertiveness plays more of a role in your Contact Center than the trainers realize. Doing ranking comparisons allows the trainers to get a better understanding of what skills are crucial on the floor. As such, they can retool training to be more in tune with the skill set needed on the floor.

Phase Seven: Look at the three rankings per employee. Identify strengths and weaknesses per employee so Quality Specialists can customize Quality Coaching sessions for captured contacts. Also, provide this information to trainers who conduct ongoing training so they can identify individual training needs.

When you link performance back to hiring and training you strengthen the circle of hiring, training, and performance. Your recruiters will more quickly and efficiently evaluate applicants and your trainers will be better equipped to train successful agents. The numbers of applicants that you have to go through to find a successful agent will go down and retention will go up.

After a few Linking meetings, recruiters/trainers/coaches started emailing each other new ideas, without any prompts from management. They sent emails along the lines of “I wonder if there is a link between test X in our training program and performance on the floor. And if that’s true, then we should have more questions in our interviews on that skill set”.

A culture of linking recruiting, training and coaching with performance took hold and it has helped the company I work for increase the performance of the Contact Center.

About the Author..................................

Marc van Baar is the Support Education Manager at Blackbaud. After starting as a customer support analyst, he became a software instructor and taught clients throughout the United States and Canada. Mr. van Baar currently manages the Support Education team. This team is responsible for hiring, training, and developing Customer Support staff. Mr. van Baar is originally from the Netherlands and regularly speaks at conferences throughout North America.