In any customer-facing business, customer service agents are one of your greatest assets. In call centers, especially, your agents are the gatekeepers of accessibility to your company, often bridging the gap between the services offered and valuable customer experience. This makes finding, training and retaining excellent call center talent crucial to the overall success of a company.
Ultimately, investing in agent happiness and satisfaction equates to an investment in a business’ very own future. Lower turnover means that businesses will save time and money, and this is something that works out in everyone’s favor.
The key to excellent call center agent retention lies in ensuring their happiness within your business when working together. With this in mind, there are quite a few things that businesses can do to contribute to agent satisfaction and overall success.
Create an Environment of Growth
In any business, from top to bottom, each member of the organization should feel as if they are continually developing their skills and developing as individuals. Businesses themselves are doing the same thing all the time! It’s crucial, then, that call center agents feel a sense of purpose within a company. The best way to give this to your employees is to create measurable and transparent performance metrics so that they can have a sense of how they are doing, and how they can grow within your business.
This transparency builds a sense of trust between employees and their managers, and also gives them the chance to meet and even exceed expectations.
Invest in Training
One of the biggest frustrations that many employees have is often feeling overworked and ill-equipped to manage their tasks. Conversely, businesses often feel the impact of this when they are left with unhappy employees that leave, or worse, are in a position to be let go from their assigned roles. This is often a result of the lack of proper training that businesses are often too busy to invest in, causing extreme frustration at all levels.
Hiring a new team member is an investment, and as such, businesses save money in the long run by having well-trained employees that are increasingly efficient at their jobs. One way to ensure call center employees are advancing is by using decision trees as a training aide. Call center agents can internalize business procedures and best practices in an interactive way, all while deepening their understanding of how to better help customers. Having this useful tool saves employers time, and promotes employee efficacy.
Value the Individual
Teams are dynamic and are made up of many different types of people with many different strengths. It’s important for managers to make the effort to get to know who their employees are and utilize the strengths of each individual.
When making environmental considerations, tap into feedback from employees about what could make for a more engaging environment. In meetings, vary the exercises and challenges in ways that appeal to both introverts and extroverts alike, so that each type of personality has the opportunity to thrive.
Tapping into the unique specialties of each member of your team makes them feel valued and recognized, and adapting to those qualities creates a much more fulfilling work environment. Making team members feel valued as individuals is key in making sure they feel motivated to continue giving their best.
Give Your Employees the Tools They Need for Success
When it comes to call center workflow, it’s important that things are running smoothly and efficiently — that means that agents need to have the tools they need to make that possible.
Providing updated and dynamic calling scripts give your agents flexibility to lend their unique strengths to each support ticket. Chatbots or customer-facing interactive decision trees allow customers the opportunity to solve some of their own preliminary questions, freeing your agents’ time to attack deeper problems with customers.
Using decision trees helps customer support agents remain efficient and secure, knowing that they can provide support to customers faster, and more effectively.
Foster a Sense of Community
We are often at our best when we know that what we are doing has value. When employees feel valued and supported by their colleagues and managers, it bolsters performance and allows for exponential growth and motivation. Working in an environment that allows employees to connect with one another significantly lends itself to increased productivity. Studies show that employees who feel supported and challenged by their peers are more likely to excel and bring more value to their company. Businesses can do a lot to create a sense of community within their work environments.
- Create friendly competitions like sales goals with prizes and incentives
- Allow for regular team-building exercises (and not just during a crisis)
- Give employees substantial break time to really connect with their colleagues outside of hours on the clock
Having a sense of community truly brings out the best in teams, from call center agents to upper management and beyond.
Fostering a team of excellent call center agents is a worthwhile investment. While it may not seem immediately necessary to spend the initial time and expense to invest in the individuals on your team, the payoff will be immense in the long run. Fortunately, there is a lot that businesses can do to ensure that their call center agents are well-trained, motivated, and well-supported. To set up a training system that can save you time and money, Zingtree is here to help. Get a free trial today, or get in touch to set up a demo with someone on the team, and learn how to optimize your call center today.