5 Ways to Dramatically Improve Employee Performance in a Few Short Weeks with Desktop Automation

Managers in service organizations have it tough. They are constantly being pressured to improve employee productivity but are rarely given the tools they need to do so.

Let me introduce you to five managers who succeeded in improving employee performance by leveraging the same solution, but to achieve different goals:

• Find hidden capacity.
• Increase employee productivity.
• Improve processes.
• Help ensure PCI compliance.
• Automate alert notifications.

And what solution helped them do this? Let me introduce you to Verint Desktop and Process Analytics.

What Is Desktop and Process Analytics?

Verint Desktop and Process Analytics is a suite of software solutions that gives managers a level of visibility into employee activities that they never before have had. A small applet sits on the employee desktop that tracks and timestamps the applications your employees are using. Managers can now understand what their employees are doing, when and for how long.

You can also create desktop “triggers” to:

• Capture specific activities, such as the start/stop of a process or the input of a value in a field.
• Tag records with unique identifiers, such as a customer code.
• Trigger an action, such as generating a pop-up alert reminding an employee of a next step.

More advanced modules enable you to create real-time process maps by linking triggered events. These process maps can help you identify process variations and analyze processes to identify bottlenecks, opportunities for automation, and average handle times for process steps.

As you can imagine, this level of insight and capabilities can help managers solve a LOT of problems.

Now let’s get back to those five manager stories I promised you and the business challenges they overcame with Verint Desktop and Process Analytics.

BTW, the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Okay, full disclosure; the names have been changed because Legal demanded it. 

Find Hidden Capacity to Maximize Resource Utilization and Enable Growth

George is the VP of a newly created Shared Services group for a global insurer. He has a mandate straight from the CEO to create an Operational Excellence program to:

– Employ the right combination of people, processes and technology

– Enhance employee productivity and value of any business operations

– Drive down the cost of routine operations.

George decided his first step was to create a trusted source of employee performance data and a common reporting structure. You see, each group or operations had their own way of tracking activity — often a manual way with employees self-reporting activity. George wanted to standardize and automate the collection of employee activity.

George started by deploying Application Analysis and Application Event Triggering from the Verint Desktop and Process Analytics solution, as well as Verint Performance Management scorecards in two Asia Pacific sites and three U.S. sites covering 3,400 employees.

It was very important for the insurer to instill a culture of transparency, collaboration and partnership across borders. Scorecards allowed the employees and managers to have visibility into the same data. Knowing the same approach was being used to evaluate everyone helped employees accept the new scorecards and performance management processes as fair and equitable.

Sample employee performance management scorecard

Pro Tip:

To establish a true baseline of employee behavior, many customers deploy Application Analysis “blind” for a month, meaning they don’t at first tell employees about it. Once they have an accurate baseline, they officially launch the solution.  Employees are then given another 30-day grace period to self-correct behavior before managers start having conversations about performance using the data. Many customers see a 10% lift in productivity during that first month just from employee awareness of their metrics. Note that this approach is not for everyone. Union shops, or organizations with full disclosure policies may not be able to do a “blind” launch.

So what did George learn from the new data? They had a real problem with aligning employees with work arrivals and volumes. Employees were spending a lot of time idle, waiting for work to come in. Once they identified this “hidden capacity,” they were able to:

1. Realign schedules to better match demand
2. Redeploy employees to new areas and activities, increasing resource utilization
3. Enable growth by taking on additional work without the need to hire new.

In fact, they lowered full-time employee costs by 26%, which equaled more than $9 million in savings! They also reduced overtime costs by $550,000 by better managing the workloads, and time spent creating administrative reports was cut by 3%.

Incredible, right? So let’s learn about another of our manager’s successes.

Increase Employee Productivity by 5% to 10%

What if I told you that Michelle improved employee productivity by 16 percent annually — the equivalent of 800 hours per week! And, she did it by focusing on a single performance metric. Here’s Michelle’s story.

Michelle is a Team Lead in the contact center at a large non-profit healthcare insurer. She had tools in her contact center to measure employee performance, but lacked the same data in their back-office operations, which was part of their customer service operations. This included 850+ people in claims processing, enrollment and billing, and membership management.

Michelle really needed to understand how these employees were processing their work, because the insurer was incurring excessive overtime, rework and missing their turnaround goals. With Application Analysis she was able to categorize the applications employees used into two buckets: either production-related or non-production related.

Her team was also able to capture and quantify time spent idle or in off-system activities such as meetings, training, on breaks or PTO using a tool called My Time.

Do you suspect you can get more out of your team? Read the Executive Perspective: Your Workforce: An Underperforming Asset?

By simply focusing and coaching employees on one performance metric — percent of time in production vs. non-production — Michelle was able to immediately improve employee productivity, resulting in a 16 percent annual increase.

She then used Application Triggers to tag the start and stop times of processes and process steps, giving her actual processing times. Michelle then adjusted production rates for the various teams. Employees now had new, more aggressive production targets to hit. This enabled the insurer to more consistently hit its member service goals.

Overall, Michelle was able to save her insurer more than $1.2 million in the first 18 months of deployment by increasing time spent in production and establishing common production standards.

Way to go Michelle! Sometimes it’s the simple changes that can make the biggest difference.

Our next manager has more of a bird’s-eye view of her organization.

Baseline and Improve Processes to Increase Operational Performance

Sarah is a Director within the Business Process Services group at a global IT services outsourcer. The outsourcer is a big believer in Lean and Six Sigma and had established a Center of Excellence to:

– Drive process consistency

– Identify opportunities to streamline processes across the organization

– Uncover opportunities to automate processes.

Her problem was: How do you quickly capture accurate data on complex, multi-step, multi-touch processes? If you’ve ever been part of a process improvement project, you know a lot of time is spent observing and interviewing employees to determine how they execute work. This is very costly and time consuming.

Sarah knew there had to be an easier way.

And she found it with Verint Desktop and Process Analytics — specifically the Process Discovery and Process Analysis tools. Using Application Triggers, they created triggers for the activities that indicate a process has started (e.g., opening a new order or service request form), and triggers for all the possible end points (order shipped, cancelled or delayed).

Then by building triggers at known steps within the process, Sarah was able to get real-time maps that at first showed just the major processing steps. As she worked through the analysis, she could add additional triggers for minor steps to get an even clearer picture of the different paths employees take to execute the same process.

“Verint Desktop and Process Analytics was the foundational step that gave us the missing process analysis piece we needed to help us drive automation much faster.”

Sarah took a step-by-step approach to identify the highest-value processes for automation and optimization:

1. Create baseline metrics on pilot processes that are performed by multiple groups
2. Analyze these processes to identify those with highest potential for automation, Lean/Six Sigma refinement, and best practices
3. Trigger set ups for before and after process changes
4. Evaluate results and refine based on data collected.

Sarah and her team were able to identify:

• 84 overall opportunities to improve processes
• 24 opportunities for Lean improvements
• 23 opportunities for Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• 37 opportunities for customer experience (CX) improvements.

Sarah’s organization is in the midst of implementing many of these improvements. Look for a future blog post where we share her success! For now, let’s look at a more specific use case with Juan.

Help Ensure PCI Compliance and Simplify Call Tagging for Retrieval and Reporting

Juan is a Senior Business Consultant in the Life and Retirement Solutions group of a multi-line insurer. He supports roughly 260 contact center agents handling more than one million customer interactions annually — every call is recorded for regulatory as well as customer experience purposes.

To ensure Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, the insurer implemented Verint Desktop and Process Analytics.

Juan was able to create desktop triggers that automatically pause call recordings when sensitive payment card data is collected, and resumes recording once the step is completed. Additionally, Juan created “pop-up” alert notifications prompting agents to recite precise language during customer calls to ensure compliance with specific state insurance requirements.

Juan was also able to build triggers to tag recorded calls with data from the call log such as customer ID, product type, service type, dollar value and more. Call tagging made it easy for the calls to be captured in their CRM system and retrieved for quality audits and reviews.

If you aren’t familiar with PCI Compliance, check out the Executive Perspective: Don’t Risk a PCI Compliance Breach in Your Contact Center: Automate and (Almost) Forget It!

Whew! Four down, one more to go.

Automate Alert Notifications to Flag Non-Compliant Behavior

Christine is a Senior Director of Customer Care at a highly rated cruise line. Each year thousands of guests enjoy cruises to ports spanning seven continents. The cruise line strongly believes that a key component of providing premier service to their guests is ensuring complete customer data protection and privacy.

As Juan did, Christine had implemented Verint Desktop and Process Analytics for PCI Compliance. Christine then took Application Trigger a step further and built automated alert notifications. These alert notifications are sent to supervisors when certain out-of-compliance activities occur or if a transaction is left incomplete. The additional trigger alerts have resulted in reduced call-backs, which has translated into increased customer loyalty and confidence.

Now It’s Your Turn!

There are so many ways you can improve employee performance with Verint Desktop and Process Analytics. And I didn’t even mention that the true beauty of the solution is that it requires minimal IT resources and server space to install. No lengthy data integrations are needed! And most customers see results within weeks of going live.

Which business case could help your organization gain some quick wins?

• Finding hidden capacity?
• Increasing employee productivity?
• Improving processes?
• Helping ensure PCI compliance?
• Automating alert notifications?

Share below in the comments section how you envision leveraging Verint Desktop and Process Analytics to improve employee performance in your organization.

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To learn more visit www.verint.com/dpa.

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