This blog is about incentive schemes
Is it all about the money? – Paul Weald talks us through what he thinks works.
Many years ago a former boss of mine, who was a commercial manager, told me that you condition people by how you pay them. He had a simple philosophy regarding incentives schemes – for him it was “all about the money”.
Some 10 years later, and with many call centre projects now under my belt, I would beg to differ. For me, incentives schemes that work are a combination of reward, recognition and real-time feedback.
Yes, reward is about the financial element – but encompasses more than just cash;
Then recognition is about staff knowing that they are doing a good job and feeling valued as a result;
And finally, real-time feedback provides information to agents and teams so that they know how they are performing and what good things will happen to them if they raise their game – right here, right now!
So for an incentive scheme to be successful it needs to address all three factors. Let’s look at some real life examples.
Balancing effectiveness and efficiency
In a sales environment, how do you ensure that the right behaviours are reinforced? It is about having some “stick” as well as “carrot”. For example, be prepared to withdraw the incentive scheme payments from those that don’t achieve the minimum standards you expect.
In the run-up to Christmas, one of our retail clients wanted to maximise the efficiency of their call centre at the same time as incentivising agents to sell. Good agents could earn an extra £2 per hour through individual orders taken but only if they achieved threshold targets for availability and schedule adherence. The scheme ran cumulatively for a month and each day the ’scores’ for each agent were produced. The whole bonus would be paid at the end of the month, but only if the agent achieved their cumulative thresholds. The results for the centre were astonishing. Not Ready time was halved; sickness was negligible and orders per hour were up across the board, and most agents had a nice Christmas as a result!
Think of alternatives to cash
Commission payments worked well in this situation as the money had meaning because of the time of year, but how do you sustain this type of performance uplift across an entire period? Think of alternatives to just paying cash.
There are many incentives and motivation companies that administer different types of scheme where your agents earn ‘points’ which then qualify them for prizes. Remember that your agents have different motivations for wanting to work – for some younger members of the team it might be about having the latest technical gizmo – iPods and Xboxes, etc.
For other members that run a house and raise a family then the ability to use the scheme as gift vouchers for certain stores or even a discount off the weekly shopping bill could be important. One of our clients has just passed all of their commission budget over to an incentives company and hopes to see a 10% uplift in performance as a result.
Recognition schemes
One of our clients, is running a scheme that is all about the recognition of staff. Borrowing from the theme they have branded a ‘Thank You’ board. Each month anyone in the company can post on it a personal thank you to another member of staff – the nomination can be for anything, however large or small.
At the end of the month a winner is drawn from those people nominated throughout the month. All winners are displayed on the wall next to the board in the rest room, and – yes, you guessed it – they win a box of . To make this more fun all agents have a super hero alias and all nominations are delivered under these aliases. To get everyone’s involvement they even had a charity dress down day – or more to the point, dress-up day – all wearing their super hero costumes!
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