Credit Card Company: Employee Engagement

One of the largest credit card companies in the United States wanted to improve its call centers' performance. Company leaders wanted to achieve sustained operational improvements without sacrificing the company's reputation for outstanding customer service.

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 program included an annual census of employee engagement using Gallup's Q ¹² 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 Q ¹² process has increased significantly -- from 20% to 30%.

Over time, the best managers and workgroups continue to improve their Q ¹² results. Managers and their workgroups that participated in the Q ¹² 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 Q ¹² scores predict call center performance in two keys areas: calls handled per rep per hour and average call-handling time per rep.

• A 5% to 10% improvement in worker engagement results in an improvement of approximately 323 to 646 more calls per representative per year.
• A 5% to 10% improvement in a call center's Q ¹² scores results in an increase of approximately 1,227 to 2,454 more available call minutes per representative per year.

The Gallup Q ¹² 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.

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