As a call center manager or supervisor, you may pride yourself on your fairness. You understand that treating agents with an evenhanded and equal approach is important. However, it's not your perception that matters: it's your agents' ideas about what is fair that matters. If your call center agent pool is comprised of mature adults with long careers behind them, thick skins and a high degree of tolerance for criticism, then you are fortunate. However, chances are, you employ a lot of young people who may be new to a workplace environment, particularly one where a workforce is almost literally elbow-to-elbow, as in the call center.
The causes of high turnover in the call center are not always clear-cut to company management. Sure, you understand why an employee quits if he complains that he's not getting the shifts he wants or is offered more money by another company. But more often than not, it is soft, intangible things that cause friction in the call center. Agents feel their goals are poorly communicated and measured. That another agent was trained better than him or her. That supervisors always choose to monitor on the agent's "bad" days while ignoring the good conversations. That supervisors are keeping a closer watch on him or her than other agents. That company management is stressing training on issues the employee feels he or she has already mastered, while skimping on areas the agent would truly like help in (but is unwilling to ask).
Today's call center technologies go a long way toward creating and maintaining fairness in agents' jobs. Workforce optimization solutions allow for schedule and vacation swapping that is done automatically based on seniority, coverage needs and who asked first rather than supervisors picking and choosing who gets the good schedules and who doesn't, which tends to bring about accusations of "favoritism."
Quality surveys of customers can be done randomly, helping catch a more representative range of opinions. It's well known that in the contact center, if you leave it up to customers to decide when they want to offer feedback, they are generally going to take time to offer it only when they've had a negative experience. And if you allow agents to "push" surveys to customers, they are, of course, only going to "push" when a call has gone well.
Speech analytics, too, can help supervisors become aware of where agents really need help, and where they are strong. Supervisors can take steps to correct errors - or areas where training may be thin for certain agents -automatically by pushing the appropriate e-learning modules to call center agents, allowing diem to learn at their desks during their downtime with no judgmental manager standing over them. In this way, a supervisor need not either publicly single out an agent for a problem; i.e., "Suzanne, you really need to improve your close rate," or take the time out to pull the agent aside for private, individualized learning, which carries its own stigma.
Call recording allows you to record and store all of your agents' calls, if necessary, and access them easily. Not only do many industries today require 100 percent recording of customer interactions, it can be a good idea to avoid agent/customer "he said, she said" scenarios. You can use the recordings to find out where agents are weak, but on the flip side, you can use the recording to let agents know what they are doing well.
Improving the perception (and the reality) of fairness in the call center can go a long way toward reducing agent attrition and nipping the "disgrunded agent snowball effect" in the bud before it blooms into resentment of company management. Because when a group of people is working is working elbow-to-elbow in a call center environment, disharmony is the very last thing that's needed.
No comments:
Post a Comment