Gossips on the call center floor or outside the office premises are equally unavoidable, and are bound to take place no matter how hard the management tries. Gossips in a call center can be regarded as a necessary evil as it has both negative and positive effects on call centers’ performance and productivity.
However, it is quite critical for the management to do away with destructive gossips so that employees come up with enhanced productivity and high quality output. Service providers of off-shore call centers just cannot afford to let destructive gossips continue since it can and will bring down their performance. Moreover, it will weaken their position in the industry.
Competition is immensely fierce today and no call center can simply afford to deliver sub-standard customer service to customers. Here are some of the effective techniques so that undesired gossips can be stopped in a call center and the productivity of the employees can be improved.
Gossips should be properly analyzed
The gossips that take place at a call center will help you to get proper information about the exact nature of topics that are being gossiped about. As a part of the management, you have to realize that all the chit-chats that go around in a call center need not always be bad for your organization, since there may be some level of truth in the gossips.
It can also act as a free and honest market research for the call center. It can be good for the organization if you are able to extract maximum information so that the productivity can increase automatically. Moreover, when you get to know the identity of the employee who has started such nuisance, it is easy for you to initiate action against that call center employee.
Conduct an informal meeting
When you find that it is becoming quite difficult to manage gossips, you need to schedule and hold separate meetings with individual teams and do your best to reassure them about their stature, rewards and work. You need to convince them that it will be a pleasure for the management to act and listen to their criticisms and concerns if any. Try to explain call center employees or teams on how their gossips and behaviour are adversely affecting the call center’s overall performance and productivity.
Initiate stringent actions on evidence of any harassment
Harassment should not be ever tolerated irrespective of religion, gender, colour, race or any other factors. Harassment not only spoils the work culture within a call center, but also has a negative impact on the company’s reputation and image in the market. Moreover, when the environment gets poisoned due to harassment, the productivity of the call center agents also is severely affected.
Boredom must be removed
It has been studied and observed that, often experienced agents also start indulging in destructive gossips when they start getting bored with their nature of jobs and assignments. In such scenarios, it is important to have proper strategies in place for reducing the boredom that experienced and senior employees goes through.
One of the ways of doing so is by increasing the scope of their job responsibilities or trying to offer them challenging and new tasks so that they get occupied with their new assignments and derive satisfaction from their jobs. Such a strategy will also enhance the productivity of these employees in a call center.
Seek and pick out all troublemakers within your organization
It is a known fact that there will be always some employees who will always be dissatisfied in an organization. These are the employees whose active involvement in spreading destructive gossips are the most and can also affect the other employees quite easily. It will be a critical task to seek out all those employees in a call center before it gets too late and they cause a great deal of harm in your call center’s working environment.
You must engage each one of them in individual dialogs and narrate what are your expectations from them. However, even after these one-to-one interactions, if they still continue to indulge in negative gossiping; you do not have any other option apart from terminating them from the company. It is always better to get rid of such employees from your call center.
All clients who outsource their business processing to a call center would demand top class customer services. If these clients feel that the productivity of your call center employees are declining or is not at par with the other players in the market, they may leave you and avail services from your business rivals. Therefore, you need to ensure that any undesirable gossips at your call center are brought down.
References: https://www.callcentersindia.com/call_centers_news.php
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