An example Agent Incentive Calculator is available for download at the bottom of this article.
Incentives are meant to motivate, encourage, and reward certain behaviors.
We recommend different incentives based on the level of competency your agents have achieved using Revinate Best Practices and Technologies. There are 5 basic types of behavior you will want to encourage for your agents:
- Accurate call results
- Accurate lead data and management of leads
- Meet call scoring goals
- Meet individual inbound lead call conversion goals
- Meet overall revenue goals
There are two phases to our agent incentives. The first is the Behavioral Plan and the second is the Performance-Based Plan.
Agent Behavioral Plan
The purpose of the first phase is to motivate good behavior and highly recommended when first implementing Revinate to help with change management. Without a good foundation, you will not be able to measure improvements in conversion, will not have good leads for follow-up, and will not have good lead data for your marketing or revenue management teams. In addition, it’s important to start scoring calls right away so that agents understand that their sales skills will be monitored. All agents should reach their goals for this phase before they move onto the next phase.
Sample-Agent Compliance/Call Scoring Incentive Plan
Lead Management—Non-Compliance
|
Non-Compliance % |
Sample Bonus* |
|
10% |
$25 |
The results of this metric are provided on the Scoreboard report in The Reservation Sales Suite and we recommend having a non-compliance percentage of less than 10%. Completion of a lead form, dates of stay, reason for stay, and attempting to gather the email address are the major items that you are looking for in compliance. For calls resulting in a booking, the recording of a confirmation number and booked revenue are also part of compliance.
Accurate Call Results
While accuracy of all call results is important, we recommend basing this incentive on the number of non-lead calls that were changed to a lead call. The maximum number of non-lead calls changed to a lead call during a month should be four (4). This metric can be found on the KPI report.
|
Call Accuracy Requirement |
Sample Bonus* |
|
4 or less non-lead calls changed to a lead call |
$25 |
Call results should be regularly monitored and audited by utilizing the Call Results Exception Report. Accuracy in call results is important for ensuring accuracy in the measurement of an agent’s lead call conversion as well as overall lead data capture.
Call Scoring
This component is recommended to encourage the agents to begin to follow the Non-Negotiables (or any applicable scoring template that you choose to implement) in each lead call they facilitate. Call scoring performance is measured with the KPI Report as well as through the Agent Scoring Report.
|
|
Scoring % |
Sample Bonus* |
|
Utilized Proper Greeting |
90% |
$10 |
|
Use Interactive Dialogue |
80% |
$20 |
|
Personalize the Conversation |
80% |
$10 |
|
Convey Confidence & Pride/Make Personal Recommendation |
80% |
$20 |
|
Be Professional & Courteous |
90% |
$10 |
|
Ask for the Reservation |
80% |
$20 |
|
Thank the Caller |
90% |
$10 |
*Bonus type or amount should be adjusted to the level that makes sense for your business. This sample incentive plan would pay an agent $150 if they achieve maximum results.
Performance-Based Plan
The second phase is used to help motivate and reward your agents for improving their sales skills and to ultimately pay them based upon their sales performance. This performance-based plan is based on inbound lead call conversion performance, achieving a revenue goal and the team obtaining a goal that is important to your organization. Once agents recognize that they will be rewarded for improving their sales skills, they are more accepting of coaching and work harder at improving their inbound call and outbound call sales skills that will ultimately result in increased revenue. It is still important to monitor your agent’s call results, compliance, lead management, and call scoring during this phase. Without accurate data and quality scoring metrics, you could be losing revenue opportunities in your business. Revinate has created an easy to use incentive calculator that can be obtained through your Customer Success Manager and is outlined in the next section. It is important to keep in mind that this is a starting point and you may need to deviate from specifics outlined in this plan to meet the needs of your specific business and achieve the goals that are most important to you.
Inbound Lead Conversion
The first component of this plan is based upon inbound lead call conversion performance. It is recommended that you keep this portion of the incentive plan “capped” by using a tiered approach. You want to reward agents for higher performance on first call resolution, but since conversion can fluctuate throughout the year you don’t want to potentially overpay on this metric. Lead call conversion is a good indicator of sales ability, but more weight should be placed on Revenue. The table below is an example of what these Agent Conversion Tiers may look like:
|
Tier |
Amount |
|
0% |
$0 |
|
35% |
$50 |
|
40% |
$60 |
|
45% |
$70 |
|
50% |
$80 |
|
55% |
$90 |
|
60% |
$100 |
When determining what your tiers should be, you will want most of your agents to fall within the middle half of your tiers. For the above sample you would want most of your agents falling between the 40% and 55% tiers. The top tiers (55% and 60% in this case) should not be consistently achieved. If they are you will want to adjust your tiers. It is best to pull previous month’s data to see where the team performs historically when setting up your tiers.
Total Booked Revenue
The second component of this plan is based upon an agent reaching a monthly revenue goal. This goal should be closely tied to the team’s revenue goal that you set on the KPI report. For example, if you set a monthly team revenue goal on the KPI of $560,000 and you have 7 full time agents then you should set the individual revenue goal for each agent to $80,000. If you have part time agents, you should set their goal accordingly to how many hours they are scheduled to work for that month. Other factors may come into play when setting this goal and your Customer Success Manager can help guide you through these different scenarios.
It is important to hold your agents accountable to achieving their revenue goal. If they are not meeting expectations, then your business may not be meeting your own financial goals. It is also recommended that you do not cap the payout of this portion of the incentive plan as we have seen the highest ROI and increased agent retention with client’s who allow their agents to go above and beyond their goals knowing that they will benefit from their increased performance.
Payout for the revenue section is based upon an agent reaching their monthly goal and then getting a percentage of their total booked revenue booked. This percentage should be set to an amount that makes sense for your business. For example, if one quarter of a percentage (0.25%) makes sense to you then the revenue payout would look like this:
Individual Revenue Goal:
|
Agent |
Total Booked Revenue |
Revenue Goal |
Revenue Incentive Earned |
|
Agent 1 |
$ 68, 045 |
$ 80, 000 |
$ - |
|
Agent 2 |
$ 95, 153 |
$ 80, 000 |
$ 237.88 |
|
Agent 3 |
$ 84, 361 |
$ 80, 000 |
$ 210.90 |
|
Agent 4 |
$ 80, 103 |
$ 80, 000 |
$ 200.26 |
|
Agent 5 |
$ 131, 046 |
$ 80, 000 |
$ 327.62 |
|
Agent 6 |
$ 49, 955 |
$ 80, 000 |
$ - |
|
Agent 7 |
$ 132, 697 |
$ 80, 000 |
$ 331.74 |
|
TEAM |
$ 641, 360 |
$ 560, 000 |
$ 1, 308.40 |
To determine the most appropriate commission percentage it is recommended that you pull several months of previous booked revenue to determine what payout would have been.
Team Component/Goals
The third component is a team incentive built around a metric that is either important to the success of your overall business or an opportunity that the team has. This team piece is important because it can help unify a team by encouraging them to work together as a cohesive unit to achieve an overall company goal.
The team incentive can be on monthly goals that the reservations department has such as budgeted booked revenue, budgeted consumed revenue, budgeted room nights, or budgeted ADR. You can also incorporate Revinate metrics that the team as has an opportunity on such as total booked revenue, total outbound revenue, team conversion, team email capture rate, team productivity metrics (e.g. handle time, unavailable percentage, re-queues, etc.), or anything else that comes to mind. Your Customer Success Manager is a great resource in identifying team opportunities.
The payout for this team component should be all or nothing (e.g. $25, $50, $100, etc.) for each agent if the goal or metric is achieved by the team. This metric can also be changed periodically to ensure goals and expected results are being achieved.
Total Incentive Potential
Once you have the three incentive components identified you will need to determine the payout for each section. Revinate recommends having your incentive plan worth roughly 20-30% of your base wage amount. So, if you are starting your agents out at $10/hr. you would want your agents on average to be making $12-$13 per hour with incentive. It is our recommendation that you place more emphasis on booked revenue than the other components. A good breakdown is 25% on conversion, 50% on booked revenue and 25% on the team component.
Behavioral Disqualifiers
While overall agent and team performance is an important component to any incentive plan, an equally important component is agent behavior and overall data integrity. In the first phase of our incentive program we were incentivizing on these metrics. Now that your team has shown that they know what the expected behavior is, these behaviors should be the norm and expected of all team members moving forward.
Implementing behavioral disqualifiers will help in realizing a full ROI from your Revinate partnership as well as help to ensure your agents are holding themselves accountable. We recommend implementing four behavior disqualifiers that will ultimately result in an agent missing out on a portion of their full payout if certain criteria are not met. The main four behavioral qualifiers that we recommend are based around call result accuracy, lead compliance, lead management, and call scoring percentage.
The reduction percentages can be modified to meet your business needs and achieve your desired behavior. Our recommendation is to start with the sample outlined below and modify from there.
Our incentive calculator will automatically calculate the total incentive payout once the behavioral metrics are entered as shown below. Your Customer Success Manager can help setup this calculator with you and modify it to meet your business needs.
Monitoring Reservation Agent’s Call Results
Inbound Call Conversion Report
