Research
Industry Practices
The client's card member services division operates seven service centers across the United States, providing assistance and loss prevention, customer service, new accounts service, marketing services, loan collection, and recovery/security services to card members. On an average day, the division's automated (IVR) systems receive about 220,000 incoming customer calls; the division's customer service representatives personally handle about 104,000 of these calls, as well as answering roughly 1,300 e-mails and 4,500 customer letters. All told, the division handles more than 80 million customer contacts a year, so company leaders knew that incremental improvements -- saving seconds or pennies per contact -- would quickly yield tremendous financial gains.
Gallup's call center consultants showed company leaders the crucial connections between employee engagement and operational performance and customer outcomes. Gallup's consultants demonstrated that engaged customer service representatives are more productive, collect more delinquent payments, and are less costly to manage.
Gallup consultants worked with client management to implement a performance management system aimed at improving employee engagement in the card member services division. This comprehensive programme included an annual census of employee engagement using Gallup's Q12 metric and follow-up analysis, executive consulting, manager training, and manager intervention.
Several years into the engagement, Gallup's performance management systems have helped this client improve employee engagement and key operating measures. Over the first four years of the engagement, the number of engaged employees as measured by Gallup's Q12 process has increased significantly -- from 20% to 30%.
Over time, the best managers and workgroups continue to improve their Q12 results. Managers and their workgroups that participated in the Q12 process and then made progress on achieving their goals have become the most highly engaged workgroups in the division.
Gallup's follow-up Business Impact Analysis revealed that the division's Q12 scores predict call center performance in two keys areas: calls handled per rep per hour and average call-handling time per rep.
The Gallup Q12 process also helped the client improve its collection of unpaid loans. Business Impact Analysis revealed that a 5% improvement in employee engagement levels on the client's 60-day collection teams resulted in an additional $79,400 collected per quarter, or $317,600 annually, per team. A 10% improvement yielded an additional $635,200 annually per team.
