Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Help With Employee Motivation -- The Call Center Challenge of Challenges
The good people at Monet Software recently put up another most helpful blog post, this time concerning employee motivation.
Few call center managers would argue with the assessment that motivation is “the most important and probably most challenging management task in a call center.” If you can nail motivation, it’s amazing how many other problems seem to melt away.
Monet officials are 100 percent correct when they say the issue of employee motivation “has the biggest impact on the overall call center performance and success.” And if you were hoping for some quick fixes, an easy ten-step or five bullet pointed list to follow to solve it, sorry. “There are no simple recipes or easy answers for this. Dependent on your industry, the size of your center, the culture of your company and the people in your company, you need to develop your own plan of action.”
But that’s not to say you can’t get some help along the way -- help is exactly what Monet has to offer. Consider the following:
Practice clear communication. Your agents have to know clearly what you expect from them and how their performance is to be measured.
Include agents into problem solving. Who knows -- they might have an insight or two. Share reports and metrics with employees and discuss issues and improvements.
Recognition of employees. Publicly and individually recognize employees as a valued member of the organization. And do it sincerely. Believe us, they can tell when it’s not. Find a genuine reason to recognize someone.
Make employees more knowledgeable: What a novel concept -- invest in your employees to make them feel valued. Develop your employees' skills through training and coaching.
Build confidence. See “make employees more knowledgeable” above, and provide necessary training and coaching, including positive, constructive feedback.
Teams. Create teams that work well together.
Good infrastructure. Make sure that office, chairs, headsets and other infrastructure are of good quality and in proper working order. You might be surprised what a drain on motivation it is to know that you’re not worth a good chair.
Flexible schedules. You like start- and end-time flexibility, your agents do too.
Good resource planning. Accurate forecasting and scheduling helps reduce stress and improve motivation.
Lead by example. This means actions instead of words and mission statements.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Chris DiMarco