Your agents are crucial assets to your contact center. Serving and supporting your customers each and every day, they truly are the voice of your company. Are you recognizing and celebrating their achievements?
Many companies recognize their agents in a variety of ways during Customer Service Week. A recent Forbes article suggested some ideas such as serving your staff breakfast or lunch and hosting a fun theme day where employees dress up. Another great idea is to let the executives and agents swap roles for a short period of time. This serves as a great reminder of the value of your employees.
While it’s great to celebrate your employees during Customer Service Week, recognition programs should continue well after the week is over. But this is easier said than done. Let’s be real. Contact center operations can present complexities that make it difficult to meet key metrics, let alone allot for time to motivate staff.
Customer demand is constantly evolving, perfectly forecasted schedules can turn on a dime and processes are highly manual and reactive. How can you possibly keep up? Real-time automation makes it easy to solve these challenges and keep your agents engaged year round. Here are some ways real-time automation can help improve morale, performance, and show your agents you care:
1. Recognize High Performers: Who doesn’t like to be acknowledged for hard work? Rewarding your employees for their performance can be a game-changer when it comes to improving satisfaction. You can use real-time automation to deliver notifications to agents’ desktops thanking them for their efforts and motivating them to keep up the great work.
At a recent real-time automation event, one attendee suggested sending alerts to agents that pizza was on the way after a long shift with high call volume. Another idea: use automation to notify an agent that they can have a surprise break or an opportunity to leave early (when service level allows).
2. Empower Your Agents: Work-life balance and schedule flexibility are especially important to today’s workforce. With a mobile app, you can provide your agents control over their schedules and improve morale. They can use the app to request time off or send an update when they’re running late.
Or maybe they’d like to request a last minute shift change to be able to go to their child’s baseball game. It’s all made possible, and much easier, with a mobile app that’s part of the real-time automation platform. This type of flexibility reduces stress and empowers your workforce.
3. Provide Development Opportunities: Often times in the contact center, training has to be canceled and rescheduled when call volume is high. But training is a must to prepare your agents when speaking with customers. Providing your workforce with ongoing development is crucial to their success.
With real-time automation, you can deliver training during available time so scheduling and rescheduling is no longer an issue. Training can be generalized and sent to an entire agent population, or more specific based on individualized needs.
4. More Work Variety: It can be mentally draining when you’re working on the same tasks day in and day out. Why not give your agents a chance to explore and advance their skills? Using a solution like real-time automation, you can quickly and easily move agents across channels and call types. Providing your employees with work variety outside of the daily monotony will keep your agents feeling energized and engaged.
Your agents work hard to keep your customers happy. Why not celebrate all that they do to make your center a success? Solutions like real-time automation make it easy to boost morale and keep agents engaged year round.