Call Center Management Featured Article
Key Ways Call Center Managers Can Keep Workers Happy and Engaged
Happy workers make happy customers and this is certainly true in the call center. Yet most contact centers suffer from high turnover rates, unreliable employees and general disengagement among workers. One of the best ways to boost the customer experience is to invest in worker engagement and happiness, and this is a great starting point for call center managers who want to run a more effective workplace.
According to Gallup's State of the American Workplace report, engaged employees improve customer relationships and increase sales by as much as 20 percent. Optimizing workflows is a key way to boost worker engagement, and call centers that create a workflow that is a good fit for their agents will generally have more positive results.
Call center managers can create good workflows by assessing each agent's strengths, weaknesses and interests and then creating workflows to accommodate them. This includes organizing the team to determine which customer interactions will be assigned to each agent based on their strengths and training. Customer inquiries should also be categorized as part of the workflow process to handle different types of questions that may occur at certain times of the year. Managers can also try out different workflows within their call centers and fine-tune them based on feedback from workers and customers.
Data may also be used to enhance contact center performance, create achievable goals and keep workers engaged and productive. Managers can maximize their use of data by setting clear metrics for their teams. Performance data should be made available to each agent so they can keep tabs on how well they are performing against those metrics. Individual goals may be set for each agent as well, to keep them personally challenged based on their individual strengths and weaknesses.
Finally, managers can improve worker engagement and overall contact center performance by providing omnichannel services to support both agents and customers. That means ensuring customer histories and interactions are shared across channels so that customers don't have to repeat themselves each time they interact with a new agent. Agents should also be trained to be empathetic and supportive no matter which channel they are using to interact with customers. Coaching and training should be routine and ongoing as well, to ensure agents are being continuously challenged so they will remain engaged and productive.
Edited by Luke Bellos