Ventana Research is the first research company to benchmark the maturity and direction of agent performance management, which is a critical process in every organization that communicates and interacts with its customers or prospects across any channel. Our recent benchmark research on customer experience management makes clear that companies recognize that agents play the most important role in influencing the customer's experience during telephone interactions. Agent performance management therefore focuses on managing agents to produce maximum efficiency and effectiveness in customer interactions. Today, new technology in particular offers more effective ways to manage the agent workforce, ensure proper training and coaching, manage incentives and rewards for agents and deliver key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and assess their performance.

Ventana Research is undertaking comprehensive benchmark research into agent performance management, looking at its people, process, information and technology components. In particular, we believe that organizations can improve how they handle the information associated with agent performance management, which is key to enabling agents to interact efficiently with customers and deliver the results expected by their management. Even companies that have made significant investments in contact centers are in many cases still forcing agents to rely on multiple disparate systems or providing them with too little useful information to enable optimum performance.

This research will yield concrete insights into best and worst practices to help executives and managers to better understand how to improve their customer satisfaction efforts. Ventana Research believes that armed with research-based insights to guide proper agent performance management planning and execution, companies can achieve a competitive advantage through increased efficiency and profitability.