Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Identifying and Training Agents Who Deserve Autonomy in Their Jobs
Contact center managers weigh a series of decisions on a daily basis. In building the schedule, they must decide how many agents to put on the phones and other media channels in order to support the volume of customers. They must do it in such a way, however, that they don’t over-schedule, which wastes money. They must also decide how much training to offer agents to ensure they know how to do their jobs, without wasting time on unnecessary, outdated training programs. Finally, they need to decide how much autonomy to offer agents in their day-to-day tasks.
There is some conventional wisdom that dictates that agents who are able to make some of their own decisions in their work are better performing, more engaged and more likely to stick around and pursue a contact center career, according to a recent white paper by quality assurance solutions provider Scorebuddy.
“Employee empowerment is a strategy and philosophy that enables employees to make decisions about their jobs, it helps employees own their work and take responsibility for their results,” writes the company. “Employee empowerment enables or authorizes an individual to think, behave, act, control work and make decisions in autonomous ways.”
How empowered contact center employees are is often built into the company culture. Managers need to strike the right balance between scripting and autonomy, and they need to understand how to train employees to become empowered. They also need to recognize that autonomy will work for some employees and not for others.
Scorebuddy writes that it may seem counter-intuitive that employees can be prepared to take a more autonomous role in their jobs with formal training, but this is an important step in building better, more engaged employees. Managers need to set up formal training to identify how company goals translate into everyday tasks. It may also help to offer simulations and sample interactions to foster best practices.
“Break down the responses and place gold stars at the points that reflect the company visions and goals. Repeat this for numerous interactions so it’s clear to employees how goals can be achieved in different ways,” writes the company.
Once you’ve prepared a number of more professional, more senior contact center agents to handle transactions in a personal, customized way – in other words, off the script – it’s critical to determine which types of transactions are most suited for these “super agents” and prepare the schedule accordingly to ensure you always have a critical mass of skilled agents to customize transactions for customers who require it: customers who have had a bad transaction, for example, or those wishing to close their accounts and need a customer retention specialist. (Nobody wants to repeat the cringe-worthy experience of one Comcast (News - Alert) customer who faced a nightmare with a customer retention specialist who refused to close his account, an incident that became a social media sensation.)
It’s a universal truth that not all employees are created equal. Some deserve autonomy while others will abuse it. Be careful in your evaluations, keep company goals in mind and make it a point to find those in your organization who do deserve it.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi