3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

It’s pretty much a given in the industry that working in a call center can be extremely stressful. Angry customers can take a toll on anyone’s psyche, and when management joins the fray, workers can feel it all.

So it makes sense to let employees know you’re on their side. This is not only for the psychological benefits.  It also helps reduce worker turnover and thus eliminates the substantial costs of finding and training new hires.

A recent piece in MultiChannel Merchant took a closer look at what call center management can do to make their workers feel valued and important. Authored by Angie Stocklin, COO of online eyewear supplier One Click, the column offers some welcome insights to help keep workers motivated and on task. To wit:

Set The Stage For Success: “It takes a little bit of groundwork to empower your agents to work on their own,” Stocklin wrote. “One way to lay this foundation is to make sure you choose the right metrics when it comes to evaluating your team’s performance. If you want to empower your agents to solve problems on their own, hold them accountable for a customer satisfaction score over a call-handle time.”

Provide Agents With Valuable Training: “Onboarding training should be a critical period of learning for your call center agents,” she noted. “A detailed overview of your company’s systems, policies, and products at the beginning of an agent’s career can help prevent situations in which a customer is really hostile.”

Ensure Your Policies are Customer-Centric: “If you assume the customer is always right, make sure your company policies reflect that sentiment,” Stocklin advised. “Adopting more liberal customer-facing policies can help prevent some customer service issues from occurring in the first place.”

Arm Your Agents With a Budget of “Fix-It” Money: “More often than not, solving a customer service issue involves spending a little bit of internal budget to either replace a product, or cover shipping costs,” she said. “Providing your agents with a pool of ‘fix-it’ money, either individually or as a group, can help team members feel more empowered to fix situations and offer exceptions to policies.”