Working in a contact centre can be challenging, and keeping your agents engaged and motivated each and every day can be hard. Your agents are a fundamental part of your customer experience, as they are the ones who are in direct contact with them every day. You want them fresh, energised and eager to go the extra mile.
In their book, “Primed to Perform”, Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor point out three factors that boost your team’s motivation and performance: Purpose, Potential, and Play.
- Purpose is about connecting agents to the company’s ultimate vision and goals, reinforcing that drive through the metrics you have in place.
- Potential is about making sure your agents feel fulfilled in their work, through avenues like reward and recognition, development opportunities, or other influences they feel are meaningful.
- Play is about infusing a sense of creativity and fun into their work, giving them the space to contribute and experiment with different ideas.
Lead to engage
Culture plays a huge role in how a company engages its staff, and recruits and retains the right people. A good culture supports customer service excellence, better productivity and more accountability.
As a contact centre manager, the best way to support a positive culture is to be an engaged part of the team yourself. Focus on the people in your team, not just the numbers, and when you’re looking to make improvements, talk to your team to get their ideas an input.
Building a strong collaborative relationship with the agents in your team builds better understanding around how their work connects to the company’s purpose, and the positive contributions they are making. With this understanding, your team are more likely to feel fulfilled, and will convey that inner satisfaction in their everyday interactions with customers.
Taking the time to talk with them and listen to their concerns and ideas also creates a space of empowerment. When your agents feel more control over their role, they’re more likely to look for ways to improve, boosting performance further.
Your goal should be to be a leader for your team, encouraging them and inspiring them, rather than simply be a manager who is only focused on targets and stats.
Lifting your game(s)
One topic that is emerging in the world of contact centre employee engagement is building games into the workplace. Your games may take various approaches, depending on your agents’ needs, and your business objectives, and if you tie your game into your KPIs, hitting those targets gets a lot less onerous (and even a little competitive).
Gamifying your contact centre can help address issues like boredom from repetition, limited access to training, while bringing a slice of fun into the environment. Talk to your team about what sort of games they’d like to play, and watch your work atmosphere lift. (If you need some inspiration to get the ideas flowing, check out “Six of the Best Games for Your Contact Centre” at industry magazine site callcentrehelper.com.)
If training and development is an issue, consider offering online training modules that your agents can take when they have free time – instead of being stuck offline in a seminar – and allocate points for completing different modules. You’ll be adding to a culture of learning, and your agents will be better equipped to handle customer enquiries more effectively. Their work will be more interesting, and they’ll be more engaged as a result.
The right tools for effective gamification
Our class-leading real-time Dashboard feature lets you easily create beautiful-looking Dashboard views to display what’s happening in the contact centre, alongside other data sources. These Dashboards can be displayed on large screens in your contact centre or even on the agent’s own computer, and provide up-to-the-minute results on team challenges and company-wide competitions.
