Many advisors working in a Contact Centre will handle upwards of 100 calls a day. They may not remember the individual calls, but for the customers phoning in, the call could be the most important thing in their life at that time.
Keeping advisors engaged, day-in-day-out, isn’t easy. But, get it right, and the rewards are clear: better customer experience and higher employee motivation.
We regularly see the link between customer experience and employee engagement. But it's not just about having employees engaged for the sake of it; it's about having employees engaged in the right things - and that thing should be the customer. Without the engagement of the people delivering the services, any solution will fail.
To help you keep your advisors engaged and delivering the best possible experience for your customers, here are three things that you’ll want to know.
#1 Changes don’t need to take six months to have an impact
When rethinking how you currently work to keep advisors engaged, it’s tempting to think big and try to rewrite the rulebook. But this isn’t necessarily the best place to start.
The changes you make and the improvements you implement don't have to take six months at a time. They don't have to involve intensive process redesign to be effective.
In fact, often the most successful things to change will be very quick and temporal. Simple steps, like introducing a team huddle twice a day for 10 minutes, can have an enormous impact on how engaged advisors feel.
Then, by using real-time feedback, you can measure the result of that change and assess whether it’s successful. If it doesn’t work, you can check that quickly and either revert back to how you were doing things before or make further changes.
#2 Share feedback (positive and negative) with advisors
Advisors can begin to change their approach towards customers and deliver a higher level of satisfaction, within the Contact Centre, by reading and learning what customers think and feel.
It's powerful when advisors can see the positive feedback coming through. In many organisations, positive feedback fails to cascade through. It means people never hear about the good work they’re doing, so they don’t realise the positive impact they’re having on the lives of the customers.
Give them access to the positive comments about what they’ve done and how it changed somebody's life; it’s hugely motivating, driving them to deliver the same level of service again and again.
On the other side, when feedback isn’t positive, you can use feedback to encourage learning opportunities. If an advisor receives negative feedback, listen back to the call with them and work through with the advisor to make sure that they understand why the customer was unhappy with what they did.
#3 Use gamification to support employee engagement and culture change
Contact Centres normally have big screens, showing things like call wait times and the number of calls handled.
But these screens also offer an opportunity to incentivise advisors; use them to show league tables so the advisors can see how they're performing against their colleagues.
Some people will, naturally, be a bit unsure about this. But you can reassure them about the reasons for doing it and show them, through the experience of their colleagues, the positive impacts of gamification.
The league tables drive people to be better. They don't want to get towards the bottom of the list; they want to be on the top. And, that friendly competition element will engage advisors.
As well, when there are a few people at the bottom of the league table, then their fellow colleagues will often come to their aid and help them. It creates a real team spirit. It’s that engaged culture. It's about creating the environment where everyone works together, all aiming towards one goal. It could be seen as demotivating, being at the bottom of a league table, but it creates opportunities for colleagues to work together.
The key thing is to communicate with people, so they realise these steps aren’t a stick to beat them with; it’s all about understanding what customers think so they can deliver a better experience for them. It isn't something that they'll be taken to task about - if a customer's unhappy, it's an opportunity to learn.
Advisors do need to understand why customers are unhappy and fix the issue. But they can then measure again the next time they do it and see how their own performance has changed. It's about that continuing improvement journey. It’s about ensuring they’re ready for each and every one of the engagements they have with customers, every day.
To make it easier for you, we've taken six of the most common complaints made by Contact Centre Agents and created tips to help you stay on top of your game!
