Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Benefits of Motivating Call Center Agents Can't Be Overstated
When it comes to providing the best possible customer service, agents are what make or break a call center. The skill and training of the agent, plus that agent’s motivation and enthusiasm, are what determine whether customer support calls are excellent or just mediocre.
It’s not only about customer service quality and sticking to schedules and goals: it’s about keeping agents happy. Unhappy agents lead to high turnover rates, which lead to a constant need to recruit, hire and train new agents, only to lose them again, often in less than a year. This is expensive, and it drags down quality.
Many call center experts say agent morale is one of the most critical elements of a high quality customer support experience. Nikki Gresham, Supervisor of Workforce Planning for Assurant Solutions, recently shared with call center solutions provider Intradiem (formerly Knowlagent) how she pushed agent morale to the highest levels the company had ever seen by providing flexible scheduling options for the best agents, but doing it in a novel way that goes beyond simple schedule swapping and bidding.
“We try to provide a good mix of schedule,” said Gresham. “Give them [the agents] flexible options. One of the things that we’ve started that has been wonderful for our employees is providing the top performers with the ability to make their own schedules. We ask them what shifts they prefer to work, and then we build the other schedules around them. We’ve seen a lot of success with that,” she added.
To follow this model, call center managers can use a variety of criteria to determine top performers, such as average handle time or first-call resolution, and change these criteria regularly or as needed, depending on what behavior they want to reinforce or emphasize This way, it can provide agents with different skills a variety of ways to excel and an opportunity to become a top performer. An agent whose average handle time isn’t tops, for example, might be better with first-call resolution or consistently complete calls that customers rate highly for quality.
“We have seen a lot of results with that [program],” said Gresham. “It’s a kind of friendly peer pressure, and operations loves it.”
The results have been impressive: Assurant Solutions says its average tenure for call center agents is three to five years, which is many times the industry average. When employees feel appreciated and that their skills are valued, they are more likely to enjoy the challenge of improving, if not only to earn priority scheduling but to feel that they are an important part of a team accomplishing good work.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi