06 Your floor walkers are walking away with the key to your performance.

After a short break, we are back! For those who are joining anew, this is a series of posts about operational performance management in Services. As part of my job, I get to advise and work with companies on their daily operations and several aspects of business through the COPC Performance Management Framework. I get to see a lot of interesting things, from a vantage point that is insightful as well as amusing.

It is my endeavor to share some of these insights and, also the fun, without sounding preachy. For this purpose, I will employ one chart / visual at a time for each post and try to weave the narrative around it. Hopefully this will also help in data appreciation among the readers.

This current post is about effectively utilizing your tenured staff within teams for improving performance of the overall program.

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06 Your floor walkers are walking away with the key to your performance.

Floor walkers.

A word that seems straight out of a zombie-horror-comedy or whatever post-modern Hollywood genre of movies that is trendy nowadays.

But if you have spent even some time in the customer service and contact centre industry, you know that the term “floor walkers” loosely refers to the more senior staff members on the floor, who along with taking calls, and writing emails, and handling transactions for customers; also provide advise to the other folks in the teams.

Keep in mind; I am not talking about the Supervisors or Team Leaders here. The supervisors are full time leaders of the team. The role I am talking about is a role that is usually between a front-line staff – an advisor, an ‘agent’ as they call in some cases (COPC Body of Knowledge calls this level “Customer Service Staff” or “CSS”); and a full-fledged Supervisor whose role is to manage a team of a staff.

I am talking about those CSSs who are usually tenured, maybe 8 months to a year already in the system, who know their way around, and who sometimes handle complex transactions like difficult customers or escalations; but mostly help other advisors or CSSs do their job.

The reason these staff members are sometimes called “floor walkers” is because they are expected to literally walk the floor, from staff member to staff member, helping whosoever is in the need of advice in terms of how to handle a transaction or customer query. So this is how the structure looks like usually.

The concept is of course not new, and we have seen it being used across the sites and regions we visit during our operational consulting projects for several years. It seems like a great idea and works most of the times. The CSSs see this like a fast track to promotion and career progression; the supervisors find they can delegate some of their duties and be more efficient in their own job; and the management finds that the “floor walkers” provide a security layer for the supervisory level, a sort-of local “risk mitigation and backup plan”.

But, most of all, this works because the floor walkers improve performance of the process. Your frontline staff is mostly in the business of “answer management”, as one of my colleagues says – customer asks a question, and the CSS finds the answer for the customer. The floor walker plays an integral role in this process, and as such is one of the most critical roles for the success of your customer experience.

So, it all sounds like a win-win-win; and having floor walkers seems like a no-brainer. Yet, now and again I come across situations where I find that companies fail to utilize the floor walker level to its full potential. Some companies do not have this layer at all. In some cases, there is limited appreciation of the impact that this “floor walker” group has on customer experience and business performance management. Companies find that the floor walker process does not work as they intended and then they tend to revert to having only two levels in the team – the CSS and the Supervisors – in a pendulum-like swing back to the ‘flat organization structure’.

When I tried to find out why the floor walker level fails when it fails, the typical issues that come across can be broadly classified into these three causes:

• The floor walker role is not formal. In some cases the floor walkers are not clearly identified, and the role is not formalized within the organization. There is no name for these people. The supervisor just finds someone in the team he or she can delegate work to. And even what activities to be delegated are unclear. In several cases, the supervisor ends up off-loading those activities that he or she does not fancy much; activities that are mundane (like sending reports); and so the floor walker does not really understand why this work is done and finds the additional work a chore.
• In several cases, the skills and knowledge required for the floor walker are not provided to these people. The ‘floor walker’ is just a placeholder name given because senior team members are disgruntled about being categorized in the same level as newbies. But we all know that a person may be a great technical expert, but to guide others requires a completely different skills and knowledge, along with product and process knowledge. Some people are good at making things simple for others, while some are not. They may do the work brilliantly, but they lack the ability to transfer knowledge. Some are able to mentor well, while some simply lack the skill to do the job.
• The performance management of staff does not align with the structure of floor walkers. This person is spending more than half of his or her time guiding others, but the scorecard that this staff member is judged on does not consider this effort at all. So for the floorwalker it is unclear “what is in it for me?”. In a classic case I recently saw, there are Tier 2 advisors who spend about 35-40% of their time advising Tier 1 advisors, and in fact in some situations even taking over their Tier 1 cases. But their scorecard has nothing to do with Tier 1’s performance. So if the customer gets happy and rates well on the survey, the Tier 1 gets the brownie points. Conversely if the customer gets disgruntled, the feedback does not even come to Tier 2, so they would not worry about it.

Look at it from a senior team member’s point of view, Amit. Amit is your star performer. He has spent about 8 months in the system with the same program and knows his work very well. His team manager Rohit is quite happy with him; and now decides to delegate some floor walker responsibilities to Amit. But Amit does not know that this is a special role except that Rohit called him in a meeting room and told him so. There is no other recognition.

Initially Amit takes this new role with enthusiasm, but slowly finds that there is no recognition for this additional work he is doing along with his regular work. All he sees now that is happening with him is that he is being saddled with more and more work, that is thankless and does not even get counted in his or her scorecard. Team members keep calling him now and then and he needs to walk up to them and “get them out of their mess”. He is able to answer technical queries by the newbies, but soon that is also quite thankless. So you see, Amit is no longer your shining star, and is now dragging his floor-walking feet, rather than being a key contributor to the performance of the team.

Maybe this is a bit dramatic, but you get the point. The problems in the deployment of floor walker level are all too real. Thankfully, these three issues are inter-related. Unclear job definitions and responsibilities make it difficult to identify who to give the work to and what work to give. A lack of skills and knowledge results in poor guidance and actions provided by these floor walkers to the advisors. And a performance management system that does not take into account the vital role these floor walkers play in performance of others and of the team in general leads to these activities just being done as a tick in a check-list; and without intent.

All this eventually leads to the fall of the floor walker layer, and the utter destruction of the performance of the program. So what should we do to avoid this? Here are some suggestions clearly based on the above three points and based on the examples I have seen working in the industry:

1. Clearly define the role. Treat the role formally within the structure of the firm. Acknowledge its existence. Give it a name. These roles are sometimes called SMEs (Subject Matter Experts), L2s (Level-2s) in case of some technical support programs, and “fast-trackers” in other cases. Some of my clients simply call them ‘floor walkers’. In the COPC body of knowledge, we also call them “Lead CSSs”. Whatever the name, clearly define the roles and responsibilities, activities, amount of time expected in these activities, and expected outcomes. You do not always have to create a new hierarchy in the organization structure, but that is not such a bad idea either.
2. Define the skills and train floor walkers. Have the minimum skills and knowledge required to be a floor walker clearly listed down. Also the criteria for someone to become a floor walker is useful to be clearly written down (minimum tenure, performance, discipline, attendance, and aptitude to mentor and train others). Train these floor walkers to be good floor walkers. They may be very good with product and process knowledge, but they might still need training on objection handling from other team members, on how to manage time, on how to prioritize, on how to handle unexpected situations or queries from customers, and on how to help other team members personalize the customer experience.
3. Make them partners in the performance.  This might sound cocky; but know that these floor walkers hold the key to your performance more than anyone else in the hierarchy. Understand their role in this performance, and align their performance management, rewards, recognition and career progression to this performance. Give higher weight to their mentoring role and outcomes of the people they mentor. Give points for collective team and program performance. Get them to give ideas for performance improvement opportunities and recommendations. Make them partners in this performance; and see how the numbers take off.

In places where floor walker levels have worked, they have done wonders to the business performance as well as staff motivation. So it might be worthwhile to spend some of your managerial thought and bandwidth in getting this right in your business.

Have a good week!

Shreekant

10 November 2018