Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Attracting Agents to Call Center Life
For years, call center jobs have been painted in a negative light. Long, stressful hours taking call after call from angry or annoyed people on the other end of the phone for little pay never seemed like something anyone would want to do by choice. Today however, thanks to advancements in call center technologies, automation and tactics to achieve better customer service, this is no longer an accurate depiction of the call center and how it operates.
What’s happening in the call center now is a shift from premises-based to cloud-based technology and the need for a different kind of agent.
Agents who have a mix of talents and can handle complex interactions across communications platforms will be valuable for companies.
But the struggle has been breaking the stigma around a call center agent’s work and getting more people excited to do the job.
One company has stepped up its bid to attract call center agents to do this line of work by incentivizing those who already working at them. A social media photo contest from omnichannel solutions provider Altitude called “How Was Your Day” is creating not only a chance to win prizes, but also shows others of the large Instagram audience that working in the call center might not be as bad as had been painted in the past.
David Romero, Chief Marketing Officer at Altitude commented on the point of the game: “This fun initiative aims at knowing a little better this reality and contribute to build a community of what is a very diverse group of people but that have quite a few things in common by way of their daily work at contact centers.”
This move is also important to assist with growth in the space here in North America. According to Ovum’s (News - Alert) latest contact center forecast, contact center agent positions are growing more slowly in North America than throughout the rest of the world with the number of agent positions growing only by 2 percent annually from 2013 through 2019.
A move from premises-based to cloud-based technologies and omnichannel is opening up the pool for agents who handle more complex interactions with customers.
For a chance at Altitude’s game check out the official rules HERE.
Edited by Maurice Nagle