Adopt an effective method to develop employee engagement
Developing employee engagement in call centres often seems like an impossible mission. It’s not easy to engage employees when the work is standardized, autonomy is very limited, and time is controlled to the second.
In these conditions, how can you:
– Build your reputation as an employer,
– Attract the right candidates,
– Retain the best employees?
Fortunately, HR teams now have several levers at their disposal that they did not have before.
These are powerful levers that can make a big difference, both in attracting, engaging, and retaining employees, and in improving organizational performance.
Engaging contact centre employees: mission possible!
Previously, efforts to engage employees in contact centres aimed to compensate for the standardized nature of the work, the lack of autonomy, and the culture of control that prevailed there.
HR teams had to be creative and use their full range of programs to succeed in attracting, engaging, and retaining their employees, despite the reality of working in call centres.
They now have an additional lever, that of empowering and mobilizing employees.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
It’s no longer about compensating. Instead, it’s about helping call centre leaders reveal and realize the potential of their teams to maintain profitable and sustainable customer relationships. It is often surprising how the effect of empowering and involving contact centre agents in continuous improvement can have positive effects: the quality of interactions improves, engagement increases, teamwork develops, changes are adopted more quickly, and collaboration with other channels is strengthened.
Engaging employees in a contact centre is now a largely possible mission. More than that, it is a necessary step for any organization that wants to deliver on the promises it makes to its customers and employees through its brand and employer brand.
Strategies and Tactics to Engage Employees in Call Centres
Second-by-second control, standardization of what agents say, and the separation between those who think and those who execute have lost their raison d’être today. When they persist, they no longer serve the interests of organizations; they are a witness to past practices and a certain inertia “This is how things have always been done.”
Among these, we find:
– Daily caucuses and regular team meetings,
– Activities for continuous improvement of customer relationships, processes, and systems,
– Co-development and mentoring processes between employees,
– Greater autonomy and latitude for employees,
– New ways to measure performance,
– Coaching processes and employee development,
– New skills for first-line managers.
It always seems impossible until it’s done!
We should not minimize the magnitude of this change.
To succeed, it will be useful to develop and implement a change strategy to gradually harness the potential of teams, develop the organization’s capabilities, and create better results. Well orchestrated, the first successes prepare and lead to subsequent ones in a change process that develops as the organization transforms. It is a significant change in the way things are done, bringing about lasting improvement in results, both from a human and financial perspective:
– Higher employee engagement
– Improved retention
– Ease in attracting quality candidates
– Increase in business results (costs, revenues)
– Improvement in employer reputation and brand.
By Guillaume Delroeux
Guillaume is President and Practice Leader in Customer Experience at Promethee consultants and helps organizations with customer relationship centres make the most of their technologies to maximize their impact and create legendary customer experiences.