As a contact centre manager, you know how hard it can be to motivate staff and keep morale high. Many call centre agents suffer from exhaustion due to the stressful nature of their job, which can cause lack of a motivation and impact the performance of the team as a whole.
Due to high turnover of employees in contact centres, it is important as a contact centre manager that you manage your agents effectively, ensuring that the workforce is productive and that your performance goals are being hit, whilst effectively looking after your agents’ wellbeing.
Here are MPL Contact’s tips for managing a contact centre workforce better:
1. Create a warm and open environment
As the manager, you need to create a workplace environment where agents feel valued, respected and can openly address their concerns. Even by simply greeting agents and asking them about their day will help your agents feel like they are a valued member of the team.
2. Carry out regular employee surveys
While you may have created an environment where concerns can be raised, not everyone likes doing so in person. By conducting an annual employee satisfaction survey, where results are shared with staff, you can see what areas of the call centre need improving and let staff know what will be done to solve these problems.
3. Use a variety of motivational tactics
Everybody is different, and so people are motivated differently. This is why it is important to use a variety of methods to recognise success in the workplace. A rewards programme can help you do this, where people gain points based on their achievements and the redeem them, be that gift cards, an extra holiday day etc.
4. Encourage agent suggestions
Agents are the people that get closest to your customers, and so they are likely to know what does and does not work for them. By encouraging agents to share suggestions for improvements, not only do you make your agents lives easier, but also your customers.
5. Share success
When an agent or group of agents do an outstanding job, be sure this is communicated across the whole organisation. It is critical to recognise and reward outstanding performance on a regular basis.