I was thinking this morning that I’d not only failed completely at my New Year’s Resolution, I could barely even remember what it was. Usually I’m pretty good at setting a realistic goal for myself for the year and a good portion of the time I actually manage to keep it. My 2009 resolution was to cut caffeine out of my diet and (for the most part) I have kept to it quite well.

Of course, you may be wondering what talking about New Year’s Resolutions has to do with providing support (whether it be in a call centre for basic customer service, or at a Service Desk for technical support). Well, it has to do with setting goals and targets – something that all service organizations should have – but finding a way to ensure that the front line staff are involved in the process of setting the goals.

Often times you will see situations where targets and goals for a service desk will be set by the management or supervisory teams, with little to no input from, or thought given to, the front line staff. Of course, from time to time this is going to be necessary. Targets and goals are often going to be set, or at least influenced, by the customers being served, and by whomever the service desk reports to. In other situations, the targets are (for the most part) outside of the front line staff’s control. A Service Level Target for average speed of answer (ASA) is an example of a target which, again for the most part, is out of the staff’s control. ASA is impacted by call volumes and staffing levels; the only element of control the agents have on ASA is how long they spend on calls. But that’s a bit of a vague relation in the front line staff’s mind, so it’s not something they really have much control over.

That being said, there are a good number of goals and targets that a service desk can have that the staff do have control over, or at least a reasonable level of control over. If end user satisfaction surveying is being done, the front line staff definitely have a great level of influence over that particular measurement. Average Call Length is something they have control over too (although you need to be careful about setting targets on this particular metric – as it can end in disaster if the target isn’t explained properly).

So, given that you can have some goals that the front line staff will have some control over, this provides you with a good opportunity to involve the staff in the decision making process for setting particular goals.

We recently launched an initiative in our organization that takes this concept and puts it into action, with the overall goal of having the front line staff feel a direct connection between the goals being set, the actioning/implementing of the goals, the work towards meeting them, and the final result.

What we initiated is a “New Month’s Resolution” plan. This plan involves the Service Desk agents as a whole, and is discussed and decided upon at our monthly agent meetings. At these meetings, we bring the team together on a series of conference calls and allow everyone to discuss their perspective on how things are going at their job, raise any concerns, and we use it as an opportunity to provide little motivators such as gift cards, etc. During the meeting we also discuss what next month’s “New Month’s Resolution” will be. The agents along with their supervisors and managers discuss what target they are going to shoot for over the next month.

There are some significant benefits to this approach. The first is that it forces discussion and dialogue – the agents know that the New Month’s Resolution winner receives a prize, so there is definitely a motivation to come up with something. With some gentle guidance from the management team, the agents discuss what metric they are going to set as the goal. One month it was “Lowest Average Wrapup or After-Call Work Time”. With management approval (this is critical – you don’t want the agents trying for a contest that sees them striving for the longest After-Call Work Time, for example…), the target goal is set and the agents begin working towards it.

Another benefit of this is that it allows discussions as to why these metrics matter and why they are important parts of service delivery. Now the agents are engaged and involved beyond just striving to achieve a target so they win a prize – they are striving to achieve a target they had discussed and come up with together as a team.

One final benefit of this – and it’s something that we never foresaw when we came up with the idea – is that you often discover interesting tidbits of information from the agent pool that may have never come up before. During the decision on the After-Call Work time target, some agents discussed their frustration with other agents taking too long, or unnecessary time in Wrap Up. This is unlikely something that they would have been mentioned if the discussion had not been created during the decision making process.

So, in short, a New Month’s resolution has been successful for us in that it provides the agents with a target to strive for, provides them with a feeling of involvement and ownership of the target, and as such it gives the Service Desk a motivated workforce that feels involved in the overall delivery of service and how they are being measured.