An employee’s morale has a major impact on their overall performance and production. If a person goes into work every day with little to no enthusiasm for their job and no confidence in themselves or their company, the chances are pretty good that they won’t give the job a solid effort. Contact center agents are no different from employees at any other company in this regard. If you want your agents to perform at a high level and deliver quality customer service, it’s important that you create an environment that motivates and encourages agents. In his recent article, Andrew Neff offers six actions that have been proven to boost agent morale and agent performance.
1) Offer Training Tools to Expand Skills, Then After Time Identify the Driven Agents
Discover the agents who want to perform well via personal discussions and traditional metrics. Once you determine your agents who are motivated to develop their career and the agents who are unhappy in their current role, it’s easier to determine the proper training for each group.
2) Make It Easy for Agents to Share Feedback, Then Encourage Their Input
Often, employee morale is boosted when people feel as though their opinion matters to the company and their input is appreciated. By offering your agents and outlet to provide their feedback (e.g., confidential opinion boxes or feedback meetings), you’re empowering agents by listening to their opinions and helping your company’s performance in the process. Since agents are constantly working with customers and utilizing the contact center’s technology, they can provide valuable insight into where and how improvements can be made.
3) Build Agent Experience Just Like You Build Customer Experience
Companies have been focusing on creating an experience that makes customers feel as though they’re more than just revenue; they’re a part of the company. Customers are more likely to show loyalty if they feel they’re valuable to the company, and agents will have a better morale if they feel like a valued team member as opposed to a cog in the machine. Neff recommends providing agents with information on potential career paths with the company based on performance. Another way to improve the employee experience is by recognizing when agents are performing well with specific metrics and asking for their thoughts on why they’re performing well while letting them know how it benefits the company.
4) Change How You Teach Communication Skills
Neff says that it’s not enough to train new agents by having them listen to audio samples; they need one-on-one sessions with experienced agents to properly learn the ropes. This builds up the confidence of the new agent by giving them real, practical experience and it also can boost the confidence of the veteran employees by showing them you value their experience.
5) Identify Faster System Fixes
Gather ideas from agents regarding potential issues in the system that could use tweaking, including minor problems and unnecessary steps. Once this is complete, ensure you’re constantly requesting fixes to daily issues from your system partner.
6) Transform Agents to Cross-Department Assets
Create an environment where departments work together to achieve a common goal. If departments are meeting together to discuss ideas, it develops a culture where employees feel their questions are answered, opinions are heard and appreciated, and inter-departmental relationships are strong. Ultimately, the departments will have a better understanding about each other and how the company functions together as a whole instead of as silos.
This blog post is based on an article from ICMI. To read the original article, please click the link below:
6 Actions Proven to Boost Agent Morale AND Performance – Andrew Neff
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