Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Improving Contact Center Morale Improves Schedule Adherence
While call center managers are the ones who create schedules, it’s agents who can make or break them. The best schedule in the world won’t work if agents aren’t committed to adhering to it. Once managers understand this, they can pull out the coaching, encouragement and even psychology they require to ensure agents are following their schedules.
Lack of Adherence Can Be Attributed to Low Morale
When contact center employees – who are often poorly paid and under stress – don’t care about the job they do, the customers they serve, or their own careers, adherence will suffer. Workers will straggle in late, take overlong breaks or even fail to turn up at work. Improving morale, therefore, can make great strides toward improving schedule adherence.
Steps Toward Building Morale
There are many ways, some small and some large, that managers can improve the morale of workers in the contact center. These include:
Filling out the team. If workers are doing more than just their own jobs and are feeling burned out, it’s time to hire to full capacity. Many contact centers try to limp through with too few agents, and this tactic can backfire, leading to higher agent turnover and low customer satisfaction.
Building a positive atmosphere. No one wants to work in a high-pressure atmosphere of doom. Ensure that the contact center is a warm, friendly place devoid of bullying, harmful social cliques and unrelenting pressure. Ensure break rooms have the resources employees need to decompress during breaks, and a well laid out process for expressing grievances.
Simple gestures of appreciation. Even the best contact center employees will burn out if their efforts and skills aren’t appreciated. Reward the high performers with small tokens of appreciation and be sure to reward the more average employees who make efforts to continue doing so.
Promotion. Show the best employees the ultimate gesture of appreciation and promote supervisors and managers from within the contact center ranks. When workers see that their efforts will be rewarded with a better position, they’ll be more likely to try harder.
Understanding. Try to understand why agents are out of adherence. It’s likely to be one of two reasons: cannot adhere or won’t adhere. If it’s the former, understand what the barriers are: are calls taking longer than anticipated? Is after-call wrap-up too onerous? Are desktop solutions outdated? Are agents having to carve out their own breaks from time spent overworking? If the problem is simply a bad attitude, and all efforts are made to encourage the employee to improve but adherence still lags, it might be time to part company.
Give them some independence. Every employee likes to be able to use his or her judgement occasionally. Overly scripted employees are often constrained from doing an excellent job. Give employees some freedom to exercise their judgement and do better. They’ll feel more in control of their days, which can significantly boost morale.
Edited by Maurice Nagle