In the contact center, if you understand that building a great customer experience is critical, you’re more aware than many organizations. It’s true, however, that no company can begin to build an exceptional customer experience if its front-line contact center agents are not fully engaged with their work.
Customer engagement, which leads to more loyalty and more spending, starts with employee engagement. Indifferent employees who spend most of their time dreaming about a better job are not going to be effective brand ambassadors. For companies seeking true contact center transformation, engaging employees is the best place to start.
Multiple studies have shown that American workers, by and large, are not well engaged with their jobs. Jobs are paychecks and benefits, not careers to take pride in. This is particularly true in the contact center, which tends to suffer from low pay and high turnover. Many companies do, however, manage to build great teams of agents by following employee engagement best practices. For these companies, regular performance monitoring and feedback is critical, according to a recent article by Monica Postell on Business2Community.
“The best way to sustain performance is to pay attention to what your team is doing and provide feedback,” writes Postell. “Pay attention to the floor, observe what’s going on, listen to the hum, monitor calls, and review e-mails to identify behaviors to coach.”
High quality performance management solutions can help call center managers evaluate agents more often, providing them with advice and goals that can help their own careers as well as the contact center’s bottom line. When these performance management efforts are coupled with effective learning methods and more interesting applications – think of those that have been “gamified,” allowing agents to perform and compete for tangible benefits – the agent has a better stake in the outcome of his or her performance.
“Monitoring performance puts you in a great position to be able to give feedback that makes a real difference,” wrote Postell “It puts you in a position to help tweak performance that could be even better with a minor adjustment or correct behaviors that need to change. Adding a regular cadence to your monitoring and feedback pumps up its value; reps come to expect and count on the feedback to excel in their jobs.”
Waiting until the employee is unhappy and offering up poor performance is far too late. You’ve lost that employee; chances are good he or she will be walking out the door very soon. By using performance management effectively, you can pinpoint small problems before they become large problems. In truth, employees don’t like the revolving door of serial jobs; they want to succeed in their current positions and like their work. When they do, they stay, and when they stay, they tend to become excellent customer service reps who enjoy helping people. By making their work more compelling and providing them with a way to succeed and to show they’re succeeding, you can ensure that everyone wins.
Edited by Blaise McNamee