Why you should stop hiring rockstars to man your contact center

Written by Vishal Dhar, President, Marketing & Co-founder, iYogi

Edward Demingrote in ‘Out of the Crisis', " I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportions something like this - 94% belong to the system (responsibility of management) & 6% special".

These words, written in 1986, were part of Deming's celebrated management philosophy, regarded as the singular reason for Japan's world beating organizations of the 90s. Business environment has seen several paradigm shifts. From the early days of manufacturing and streamlining business processes (like Henry Ford) to ‘Kaizen' of the 90s to outsourcing today, business processes have changed, and they have changed a lot.

What has not changed, though, is the fact that quality systems have emerged as key differentiators and provided means for attaining higher efficiencies. From manufacturing to services, customization has taken a back seat because of the costs it involves and when this happens, it has become imperative that we focus on fail-proofing systems.

The Problem
In a contact center environment - where your people are the key ingredient in your success - there will arise differences in skill, ability and motivation that you will have to address. And in my experience, this is where the greatest hiring mistakes are made. Looking for proven high performers and filling your system with them is as much a recipe to fail as evaluating and incentivizing your contact center on irrelevant metrics. What any contact center manager must understand is that if there seems to a divide between employee ability and performance, it might not be his motivation that needs to be scrutinized; it might be the system itself.

The tendency to look for, and hire ‘Rockstars' can disguise a flawed system that is making quite competent people perform much below their capabilities, and that, to an organization, is a criminal waste. Add the cost of spacing out these supposed ‘low performers' and hiring more ‘Rockstars', and you have a situation in which talent is being drained away by a poorly designed system.

The Solution
A great system, aimed at getting the best out of every employee, designed to grind out every inefficiency in the process, and implemented so every employee can become great performers, is in quite a simple way, the solution. With this kind of a systemic approach encompassing the entire work environment, there must be specific focus on tools, machines, etc. to drive better performance. The applications are immense and apply to every industry, not just a contact center. Ranging from double crank prevention in the automotive industry, designing of ports (USB, Charging, etc.) in computing industry, to providing the right workflow of information to information workers in the service industry, it is every management's responsibility to implement a system that elevates performance.

An organization that fails to do this must then, obviously rely on ‘Rockstars'. But if it designs and implements a system that takes care of performance and quality, the results will be for all to see.

With technological advancement, a significant part of systems design can be addressed through investment in the right technology, which will then enable your employees. If we do so, what we call ‘Rockstars' will be the new normal.

Edward Deming would certainly approve.

This article was first pblished in Global Services