Challenge: The Danish media company wanted to make telemarketing sales and customer service data more visible and accessible. The goal was to enhance agents' time and call efficiency to ultimately increase the company's bottom line.
Solution: Used data visualization dashboards to display individual, team, and campaign performance data. Gamification features were used to celebrate success and align teams throughout the whole organization.
Results: Improved awareness of KPI targets and well-aligned teams. Employees were more motivated to perform and take accountability for their performance. Coaching was personalized to optimize individual performance and identify how call efficiency could be enhanced.
Company Background
As Denmark’s second-largest private media group, Jysk Fynske Medier, has been committed to making daily news more accessible to everyday households since its inception in 2014. The merger company (an acquisition of Syddanske Medier, Jyske Medier, and Fynsker Medier) distributes its dailies, weekly newspapers, and digital media, to over 2.6 million contacts over the entire country every week, generating over 2 billion Danish Krone (DKK) in turnover.
Challenge
Jysk Fynske Medier needed a way to make performance data available and accessible to all its employees – ultimately to optimize time and the company’s bottom line.
Joachim Ankerstjerne, Data Analyst at Jysk Fynske Medier (JFM) describes how his previous role as a Sales Manager for B2C telemarketing at the company meant that he had the insight and the opportunity to make significant changes to the visibility and accessibility of data to all employees within the company.
"We wanted to get live visualization of performance in telemarketing – based on the person, based on the team, based on the segment, and on the campaigns."
Joachim Ankerstjerne
Data Analyst at Jysk Fynske Medier
Solution
✅ Data Visualization for Better Visibility
The solution was to invest in a data visualization tool. It was one that has paid off, suggests Joachim who describes how Plecto has become JFM’s day-to-day tool that they use predominantly for visualization so that employees can “see their performance, and see where maybe they need some help.”
Jysk Fynske Medier uses its 191real-time data visualization dashboards and 27 slideshows to make individual, team, and company performance accessible, visible, and actionable in real-time. The key to achieving this was focusing on tracking and visualizing the KPIs that are important to achieving JFM’s business goals and motivating its sales (telemarketing) and outbound customer service agents to excel in their everyday work activities.
"We’ve even made personalized Plecto dashboards for each agent – so they can have a look on their own. They only look at Plecto. That’s their whole world."
Joachim Ankerstjerne
Data Analyst at Jyske Fynske Medier
Joachim outlines how each tracked employee has their own personal dashboard, as well as individual dashboards for team leads, and overall team dashboards – for sales teams in various locations, supervisor teams, and coach teams. And, “they’re not just made, and then we don’t use them” – each dashboard is actively used on all managerial levels to guide coaching, track efficiency, and optimize business performance.
✅ Notifications & Achievements for Motivation
Jysk Fynske Medier found a solution to keep waning motivation at bay while maintaining sales and customer service team alignment – gamification tools like notification and achievements.
Celebrating small wins with victorious notifications that are sent to the entire team in real-time, are oftentimes just what sales reps and customer service agents need to keep them motivated and engaged in their work. Jysk Fynske Medier used achievements in a similar way as they did notifications. These customized awards are used to celebrate employees' accomplishments in a fun and visual way – and were displayed on team dashboards for all to see!
✅ Custom Formulas for Performance Optimization
Optimizing performance relies on pinpointing the right information, to cook down and get to the core – “the real important things”, as Joachim puts it. Sales is not one-size-fits-all, and neither are KPIs. So what was important to Jysk Fynske Medier? Optimizing call time efficiency and ultimately improving agent performance to boost revenue.
Joachim himself was able to build custom formulas that fit these goals. Two of the most significant of these were a time index KPI and a performance index – both constructed by extracting and combining metrics from a range of data systems and sources. Here are just a few of the other KPIs Jysk Fynske Medier was able to track with Plecto:
Hit rate
Revenue
Discounts
Permissions
Data Error Calls
Sales or Mail Orders
Time Index
Performance Index
Results
Jysk Fynske Medier set out to provide better performance data visibility – particularly for its sales telemarketing and outbound customer service teams. And they achieved this, plus more than they anticipated with the help of Plecto.
Data visualization dashboards have helped Jysk Fynske Medier improve:
👍 Aligned Teams & Business Goals
Aided by Plecto’s data management and visualization capabilities, JFM has been able to “connect, benchmark, and compare teams” irrespective of department, managerial level, location, working hours, variable currencies, costs, or targets. This meant it was easier to compare performance and align morning and afternoon telemarketing team shifts.
"With this data visualization, you get an awareness throughout the whole organization, that we’re actually running towards the same goals, which would be impossible without Plecto."
Joachim Ankerstjerne
Data Analyst at Jyske Fynske Medier
With sales teams in Malaga (Spain) and Odense (Denmark), it was important to take into account other factors like expected sales, the number of leads used to make a sale, the number of calls made, and time efficiency when determining performance outcomes (instead of just focusing on the number of sales made by each team). In this way, JFM made was able to show an accurate representation of performance data across locations.
👍 Motivated Agents
Management at JFM kept their front-line employees motivated by visualizing data that showcased the results of their everyday efforts. Joachim noted, "it's much easier to see their salary and other motivating metrics like reaching 100 on the performance index on their own personal dashboards." This visibility is particularly motivating for intrinsically-driven people.
Notifications and achievements were the ideal solution for more extrinsically driven JFM employees who and motivated by competition, praise, and recognition. Recognizing milestones and celebrating colleagues’ success helped to keep everyone aligned and motivated toward achieving the same goals.
Pre-Plecto, everyone in the sales department had a hit rate in their mind that they thought they should achieve. Instead of relying on these ‘gut feelings’, JFM’s individual and team dashboards provided concrete targets that could compare and benchmark performance.
Joachim notes that real-time data feedback has been critical for floor managers who are able to make instant and informed decisions or course corrections where challenges arise – preventing any sales slump from becoming more serious. He comments, “If floor managers see a sales agent on the floor who is not performing, they need to make a change right now – not tomorrow, not in three days, right now. And that’s why live data is so important” on this level where the sales are being initiated.
"It’s a tool that can help better performance – not only how many sales, but how efficiently do we make a sale. It’s easy to understand, it’s easily accessible, and you get it live."
Joachim Ankertsjerne
Data Analyst at Jysk Fynske Medier
With over 591 custom formulas and 10 data sources in use, JFM tailors their data tracking and visualization to boost performance on the KPIs that matter to them. Joachim had this to say about the custom formulas: "The possibility to code your own formulas is really important to us. There’s so many things that if I didn’t have Plecto, I wouldn’t have even thought of because you need a tool to gain this visualization. Sometimes you need the data to see what you can do with it. The more you put in, the more you realize you can do. We made some formulas I couldn’t see our teams living without today."
👍 Better Coaching
With Plecto, Jysk Fynske Medier was able to get accurate and actionable insights that informed 1:1s and coaching sessions. Time index, hit rate, performance index, permissions, discounts, and sales revenue data are only useful if you revisit and analyze them. This is exactly what Jysk Fynske Medier does. Individual employee dashboards are used to compare the previous periods’ performance and development over the course of this time.
"The personalized Plecto dashboard is the core of our 1:1 sessions with our agents."
Joachim Ankerstjerne
Data Analyst at Jysk Fynske Medier
Take this Jysk Fynske Medier dashboard below for example. The 40% of objections under the category, “no reason” indicate some performance adjustments need to be made to better communicate with and understand customers. Since 24% of customers didn’t purchase because the product was “too expensive”, JFM was also able to provide solutions such as different payment systems or tailoring the product to offer more value. More importantly, sales coaching for this particular employee was then focused on handling particular recurring objections – something that the highlighted pie chart directly tracks and reflects.
Want to boost your sales and customer service teams' performance, too?
Sign up for a 14-day free trial of Plecto and see how data visualization helps to align your teams, empowers your staff to take accountability for their performance, and can be used to personalize and improve your coaching. Take advantage of gamification features like contests, instant notifications, and achievements to master your employee's motivation so your whole company can start outperforming today!
*Disclaimer: We are committed to data privacy. All dashboard images in this blog post have been provided by our customer Jysk Fynske Medier. Names and identification photos have been blurred out for security. Plecto does not access customer dashboards without written consent.
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