Call Center Management Featured Article
Motivating Contact Center Employees is the Key to Customer Support Success
The job of any good manager should be to motivate employees. Motivated employees are more engaged and offer the company better performance, which translates to efficiency gains, improved metrics, and more revenue. It’s a simple formula, but it’s highly overlooked in today’s high-pressure work environments when “putting out fires” seems to be the norm for over-stretched, exhausted employees.
For customer-facing employees, the stakes are even higher. In the call center, burned out, unmotivated employees don’t stay in their jobs long, which puts many of these facilities into constant hiring mode. Unmotivated call center agents do not “wow” customers, which fails to tap into the potential for true customer engagement. Customers are so impressed by companies that go beyond the call of duty for them that they’re willing to pay extra for good service. An Oracle (News - Alert) study found that 86 percent of customers would be willing to pay more for better customer support.
So while we’ve established that a failure to motivate can lead to dire consequences, what are companies supposed to do about it?
“Glassdoor, a career site, asked more than 2,000 people about what motivates them to work harder,” wrote Len Markidan, head of marketing at Groove, in a recent blog post. “The leading answer? Appreciation. In fact, appreciation was cited more than twice as often as the second most common response. Eighty-one percent of employees said that they’re motivated to work harder when their boss shows appreciation for their work.”
The study also uncovered the fact that more Machiavellian methods do not effectively motivate employees. Only 38 percent of respondents said that a demanding boss motivated them, and 37 percent cited fear of losing their jobs as the great motivator. In other words, showing some gratitude and appreciation to employees for a job well done was more than twice as effective as a hard-nosed approach, which should be a lesson to all managers.
Markidan also cites friendly competition as a great motivator, and this is where newer concepts such as gamification can help. It’s important not to take competition overboard – once it becomes cut-throat and high-stakes, the motivation disappears – but with programs such as “employee of the month” (to earn gifts or a premium parking spot, for example) or gamified programs that allow employees to earn badges or points and redeem them for first pick of the vacation time, call center managers can improve workers’ performance.
Finally, managers with the most motivated employees are those who demonstrate that they truly understand what it takes to work on the customer support front lines. These are managers, writes Markidan, who are not afraid to get their hands dirty and spend time on the front lines.
“Many companies, including Zappos, Amazon, Craigslist and Rackspace (News - Alert) practice ‘everyone does support,’ a model that calls on all employees to spend time responding to support tickets and engaging with customers,” he writes.
Contact center managers are busy people. But they need to make time to ensure they are connected with contact center agents in a positive way, offering appreciation for hard work, encouragement to succeed and empathy for the difficulty of the job. Only then will employees truly be driven to engage with their jobs.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi