Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Swap Contact Center Employees' Tasks Out of Their Comfort Zones for Better Employee Engagement
With employee engagement becoming such a difficult prospect in the contact center – American workers in general are not engaged; contact center workers less so – smart companies need to find ways to challenge their agents to do better. For some companies, it’s about preventing the mind-numbing boredom that can come from repetitive tasks.
Multichannel contact centers, unlike the contact centers of decades ago, have a variety of work types today. Some agents are dedicated to inbound calls, while others make outbound calls. Some agents juggle multiple chat sessions from the Web site or mobile app, and others answer e-mail, monitor social media or even engage in video chat. While most people will have strengths and weaknesses – channels they feel most comfortable in – it’s worth it occasionally to push workers out of their comfort zones and help them gain experience in other channels. For starters, it relieves boredom. For other companies, it’s about fairness and cross-training agents to other channels to bolster their skills, according to a recent blog post by Jade Chen writing for help desk solutions provider Zendesk.
“At Zendesk, our customer success team has created a system—under the codename ‘Cobra Strike’—that randomly assigns agents bulk tickets related to a certain subject matter,” wrote Chen. “The agents then spend a week exclusively handling tickets that pertain to that specific topic. The process is completely blind and prevents support advocates from cherry-picking tickets that they know are quick and easy to solve. This pushes agents out of their comfort zone and gives them an opportunity to gain knowledge and experience with a variety of ticket types.”
While workers may profess that they prefer to focus on one task – certainly it’s easier to do a job this way – there is evidence that boredom is a major factor in employee disengagement. Workers who have to think on their feet will perform better and remain more interested in their jobs. It’s also a great way to induce workers to interact with each other in a productive way, according to Chen, and identify best practices.
“At the end of each cycle, everyone involved in Cobra Strike comes together in a meeting to share some of the tickets and concepts that they were working on, pinpointing pitfalls and areas for improvement,” she wrote. “It’s an effective way to train agents for all kinds of support situations, and also helps increase team productivity as a whole.”
It’s also potentially a scheduling and skilling nightmare for a company that isn’t using a modern scheduling solution. Manual schedule processes would put a halt on such random assignments very quickly. It simply wouldn’t be able to ensure that the right people with the right skills are at their posts when they’re most needed. Experiments are great for keeping the contact center fresh, but not if they come at the expense of customer satisfaction. Before you begin an employee engagement program such as this, ensure that your scheduling solution can handle it. The results will be worth it, said Chen, who noted that one of the best ways to attract the best talent for the job is to create a working environment that is as interesting and enriching as possible.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi