“Performix balances both productivity and quality measures in tandem, so we can be sure that our agents are never compromising customer satisfaction in their efforts to keep call time short,” Tony Hanway, Vice President for Member Services

“Because Performix provides a single source of all performance information, we've been able to reduce the time our team leaders must spend compiling and analyzing reports. That means they're able to manage more people and to provide the leadership and coaching their larger teams need.”  Tony Hanway, Vice President for Member Services

Vice President for Member Services
The Background
AOL is the leading subscription Internet services provider to the UK, with 6 million customers, including more than 500,000 on broadband. AOL credits its success to a wholehearted commitment to customer service, delivered through its extensive contact centre operations.

In independently-conducted customer satisfaction surveys AOL consistently outpaces its competitors by twenty percentage points and has been recognized by Reader's Digest as the Internet's most trusted brand in the UK.

“There's no question in my mind,” says Tony Hanway, Vice President for Member Services at AOL UK, “that service excellence has been central to our success. We've become market leaders by recognizing early what many of our competitors recognized late – that land-grabbing new customers with little thought for tomorrow is a recipe for quick wins but short term profits.

When experience fails to live up to promise customers depart quickly. We recognized from the outset that internet service provision would become increasingly commoditized and that to succeed we had to take the long view – we had to win customers and hold on to them, earning both their loyalty and their advocacy.”

Contact centers at the heart of AOL's business
To deliver its customer service strategy AOL relies heavily on its contact centers, which act as the primary contact point between AOL and its customers. In the UK, in addition to providing member services and technical help, they are also responsible for a substantial proportion of AOL's sales. AOL says the success of its contact centers has been helped by the use of performance management technology, which creates a link between individual employee effort and the company's four key corporate objectives:

1. market share growth
2. increased profitability
3. customer retention
4. reduced operational cost

AOL Europe decided to deploy the Performix performance management software suite.

A new way to manage
“We knew from the outset that, if differentiation through service was to be a central plank of our strategy, the contact centers' role would be pivotal,” says Hanway. “That meant we needed a new way to manage – most of the methodologies that existed to measure contact centre performance were based on low level productivity metrics that had no connection to what the business was trying to achieve. At that point we came across Performix and we liked what we saw. Not only did it have the potential to create synergy between the objectives of the business and the activities of the contact centre, it also recognized that the effort of individual agents could dramatically impact company performance.”

Performix works by creating a matrix that links individual agent targets to the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to govern the contact centre. In turn, these KPIs are directly tied to AOL's overall business objectives.

Performix then automates the performance management process to deliver an objective, accurate and transparent view of individual performance directly to each agent's desktop on a daily basis, helping them to manage and drive their own performance.

These are then aggregated to give managers a composite view of contact centre performance. Agent targets are weighted to reflect their potential impact on company performance, making it easy for agents and their managers to prioritize and focus their efforts upon those activities that will deliver the greatest benefit.

Sales through the contact centre
This ability to focus and prioritize has helped AOL to achieve some startling results. Despite increasing competition, AOL UK's market share has remained strong. Its agents are added by Performix to introduce cross and up-sell propositions to customers on completion of successful service calls. Prioritizing upsell activity has enabled AOL to substantially increase the number of sales following successful service calls over the past two years.

“These sales activities mean our contact centers generate revenues that more than adequately cover their operating costs. This is radically different to the typical modus operandi of our industry. While most of our competitors subsidize their contact centre costs by charging customers for service calls, we've balanced those costs by, with Performix' help, delivering additional services to customers through sales from our contact centers.”

Flexibility and focus
It is the ability to have different teams working towards and incentivized to reach specific targets that is, according to Hanway, one of Performix' key strengths.

“We're able to set particular targets for each team that reflect their priorities rather than using standard – and therefore less focused – measures across the whole centre. What's more, agents can see how they're doing against their targets hour by hour and, because performance is directly linked to their bonus and pay reward structure, they can see every day how their performance is contributing to their financial well being.”

Balancing service & cost
In the service and technical support area AOL scores highly for its ability to resolve customer issues on first point of contact and for providing information and insight beyond the customer's initial inquiry.

Performance is measured on an ongoing basis through online research that canvases the opinion of 5,000 customers each week about the quality of AOL's service when they call the contact centre.  Since Performix was introduced AOL's cost-to-serve has been reduced by 20%. As Hanway explains, “Performix balances both productivity and quality measures in tandem, so we can be sure that our agents are never compromising customer satisfaction in their efforts to keep call time short.” In addition, AOL has saved money by increasing the ratio of agents to team leaders from around 10 to 14 to one.

“Because Performix provides a single source of all performance information, we've been able to reduce the time our team leaders must spend compiling and analyzing reports,” says Hanway.

“That means they're able to manage more people and to provide the leadership and coaching their larger teams need.”

Employees embrace Performix
AOL's contact centre staff have welcomed the objectivity and clarity provided by Performix. A recent survey of agents in the company's Ireland-based contact center shows that:

1. 63% of agents agree that they are regularly coached to improve their performance, against a national norm of 26%
2. 70% believe their good performance is recognized by the business, against a national norm of 50%.

This degree of satisfaction translates into low absenteeism and attrition. AOL has seen a 33% drop in absenteeism since introducing Performix and is below the industry average on both measures.

“People stay with AOL, not because we pay more than anyone else – though salaries are competitive – but because we provide a rewarding environment with clear reward structure and strong career development, all based on a clear and shared understanding of agent performance and its contribution to our business goals. All of that is supported and enabled by Performix,” Hanway concludes.