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Hosted Contact Center Solutions Can Help Increase Employee Engagement
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Hosted Contact Center Solutions Can Help Increase Employee Engagement

October 21, 2014

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By Tracey E. Schelmetic,
TMCnet Contributor

“We live in 2014 and work in 1970,” wrote Forbes’ Jacob Martin recently. “This gap is what causes employee disengagement.”

While this is just one of many theories today regarding why employees are at record levels of work disengagement, it’s as good as any explanation. Most companies today insist on a rather outdated architecture: directors and executives on top, managers in the middle, and everyone else below. Job descriptions are rigid, “it’s not my job” attitudes are everywhere and employees simply don’t feel valued or as if their contributions to the company’s success will be valued. Most of the time, it’s not the employees’ fault: they feel caught in a inflexible structure that isn’t serving anyone.


It’s certainly not serving customers, who today expect to be able to use multiple channels (sometimes more than one or even two in the same transaction) to get a resolution on the spot. More often than not, what they encounter is a call center agent who is geographically, mentally and practically shut off from the rest of the organization.

“It’s no wonder that the majority of employees around the world don’t like their jobs and there is one key reason for that,” wrote Martin in the article for Forbes. “Work practices, attitudes, values, strategies, technologies, and ways of working are evolving and changing at a rapid pace, whereas organizations remain stagnant when it comes to adapting to these changes.”

A handful of forward-thinking companies cited by Martin are changing the rules: these include many Silicon Valley companies and established corporate giants like Unilever, who are shaking up the corporate infrastructure to put workers into more control of their day-to-day functions.

While contact centers need an infrastructure that can ensure all interactions are handled to high standards, this doesn’t mean they have to follow the old-fashioned model of “butts in seats.” Thanks to hosted contact center platforms and solutions, companies can build a better model for the contact center by allowing agents to work remotely and tying in experts to the call center with technology so companies can pursue the all-important goal of first-call resolution. It means managers can keep an eye on operations even when they’re not in the physical facility, and back-office employees can be brought in to be part of the greater contact center infrastructure regardless of where they’re located.

In the contact center, it can also boost employee engagement by allowing workers more control over their day-to-day lives: they can, for instance, request time off and vacation from anywhere automatically, even on a mobile device. They can check their schedules and make them more flexible. They can work from home, a great option that has worked for many companies to boost employee engagement.

Martin says it’s about taking the way we conduct business on the inside today and better matching it to the way people live their lives.

“We need more companies in the world that acknowledge this gap between how we work how we live,” he wrote. “Companies that focus on closing this gap are going to be the ones that attract and retain top talent, build better leaders, and thrive in the new world of work.”




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
Hosted Contact Center Home Page





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