Call Center Management Featured Article
Small Changes Can Yield Large Benefits in Contact Center Performance
If you’re looking to make a different in the contact center – let’s say, to improve employee retention and/or employee engagement or boost the quality of service – it’s probable that you’ve considered all the obvious tasks. You’ve updated the call center’s systems and solutions, recrafted the metrics, boosted training and set new goals.
If taking these steps hasn’t improved operations in the way you’d hoped, there are some other, less obvious, things you can do to boost contact center performance and change the environment for the better. According to a recent blog post by Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software, many of these things are focused on listening to and appreciating call center employees. After all, these are the people who spend their time on the front lines engaging with customers. Chances are good that they have intelligence to share, and appreciation shown to them will translate directly to improvements in customer care.
Employee engagement. According to Ciarlo, small gestures such as asking employees what changes they would make if they were in charge, and offering rewards for jobs well done, can increase the commitment employees make to the organization. In some cases, you may want to allow top-performing employees to pick their own rewards (within reason) so they have more value to the recipients.
“Agents do many things in the course of their shift that are beneficial to the company. Pick out 1-2 of these smaller successes and make sure they are recognized,” he wrote.
You may also wish to foster some gentle competition between teams or geographic locations in order to add a little incentive to do well into the mix.
Customer feedback. There is no such thing as wasted effort when it comes to customer feedback. Asking customers about their experiences more often and more in-depth will yield greater intelligence into operations and uncover more opportunities to improve. Consider following up more difficult calls with an e-mail to tell the customer you appreciate his or her business, and sharing the feedback you gather with agents in order to foster a deeper connection between agents and customers.
Innovative training ideas. While a certain amount of classroom training and one-on-one coaching is inevitable to build a good foundation of skills, think of ways you can boost training with more interesting and engaging methods. Ciarlo recommends techniques such as simulations in which workers switch roles.
“Have a manager and an agent switch jobs for one day,” he recommends. “Doing so may renew the appreciation each has for the work of their counterpart.”
Employee engagement and customer engagement are both critical to a company’s success. While pursuing both using more traditional methods is no doubt important to the company, going off the path to find more innovative ways can be small steps that can yield large benefits.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi