“The key to any organisation achieving excellent customer satisfaction is having systems in place that engage your staff in delivering unprecedented service and ongoing self-improvement”
It might sound like an overstatement, but Agents are the heart and soul of contact centers, and engaging them in business processes, especially, communication-based business processes is critical for the quality of service delivered. To improve call center agent performance, contact center executives should make sure that agents are adequately engaged. Here are four ways to boost agent engagement.
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Make Contact Center as a part of the Corporate Culture: Contact center should function as a part of the organization, that functions as per the corporate culture. Call centers are not to be treated as an extension but as a crucial part of the system. Normally the culture followed at contact centers and the enterprise is different, discouraging the agents. Perpetuate a culture of agent ownership and autonomy.
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Reward: Rewarding your call center agents for the efforts they put in is essential for motivating the employees for self-improvement. Establish reliable performance metrics, and incentivize agents according to their performance. Agents wish to be acknowledged and appreciated for the efforts they have put in satisfying the customers.
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Equip the Right Technology: Finally, arm your agents with the right kind of technology that makes their life easier. Analyze the performance metrics, and identify venues that require structured and technological improvement. These opportunities should be viewed as a profit center rather than a cost center. There are technology solutions like call-back that will help your agents in enhancing their productivity by minimizing abandon rates, smoothing call spikes, etc.
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Focus on metrics that drive positive agent experience: Coveting on straight productivity metrics is one of the quickest ways to destroy employee morale and satisfaction. Contact centers might talk about how employee-focused and customer-focused they are, but their real focus is on numbers. AHT and Call handled per hour metrics encourage the agents to focus on numbers rather than what actually matters; Customer satisfaction. Contact centers are to embrace customer-centric metrics like First Call Resolution, Contact Quality, and Customer Satisfaction.
It’s time for terms like “Average Handling Time”, “bottom line” and “ call handled” to move over and make room for “agent engagement”. Obsess over the first set of terms and you’ll end up with poor results and obsessing over the last term will boost your revenues and agent productivity.