By Mike Hill

If you are like most companies, you have a mix of employees working full-time from the office and others working full-time from a remote office, or a third group that work sometimes from the office and some from a remote location. Whichever case you have, you need to make sure all your employees receive adequate recognition.

Without recognizing your employees’ contributions, they can feel disconnected from your organization, and disconnected employees are the ones that are the least productive. In this article, we will concentrate on employees working from a call center. Without having face-to-face contact, recognition can be challenging, but it can be done.

Recognition has been described as a “core” human need. So, what can recognition do for your organization?

• It can boost the employee experience helping them to feel more competent and boost their self-esteem.
• It can help lower turnover. When employees’ achievements and efforts are recognized, they feel connected and valued. This acts as a motivator to repeat excellent performance.
• When you become known as a company that recognizes your employees, as compared to a company that does not, you will attract that level of employee that will make your company successful.

So, how do you take advantage of an employee recognition program for call centers?

You use some of the same techniques you use to recognize any other employee:

• Make sure the employee is aware of what results will be recognized. Think measurable criteria.
• Decide on what the rewards will be. Ask for employee input.
• Make it personal. Call the employee; visit them in person.
• Announce to the rest of the call center who you’re recognizing and why.

Finally, and this is particularly important to call center employees: a recognition program helps your agents to find the why with regard to their job. Author Simon Sinek states that when an employee knows their why behind their job, they become more engaged, more motivated to perform at a higher level, and more inspired.

How do you know when you are meeting or even exceeding your employees desire to be recognized? You need to ask them. Do not assume you know what they are thinking or feeling.

Mike Hill is the employee experience expert at Mobius Vendor Partners and author of Measuring to Manage. At Mobius Vendor Partners, their employee experience team has the expertise and software to make sure employees are equipped with the material and tools to make them productive.

By Donna Fluss

Most of us are tired of hearing companies complain about agent attrition. While it’s a serious issue that has been exacerbated by the Great Resignation, attrition can be corrected if a company wants to fix it. I can say this definitively because I have worked in hundreds of contact centers over my many years as a consultant and have seen “the good, the bad and the ugly” (to borrow the title of a Clint Eastwood film). When a contact center has a high agent attrition rate, the reasons are obvious.

During the last few years, contact center leaders changed the narrative by talking about agent engagement instead of agent attrition. It’s true that engaged employees are more likely to stay, but it did little to improve the agent experience and to fix the underlying issues that drive high rates of attrition.

Saying you care about employees and their future is very different from demonstrating your concern with appropriate actions. In the past, contact centers were able to replace agents when needed, but with the change in employee expectations, this is no longer the case.

Companies must migrate low-value work to artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled conversational self-service solutions, as this will be better for employees, the brand, the bottom line, and customers. However, this will not resolve the primary agent complaints, which are:

• Insufficient opportunity for promotion in the department or company.
• Minimal schedule flexibility, penalties for small infractions (such as immaterial tardiness), and lack of accommodation for unexpected life events.
• Inadequate compensation.
• Reduced company engagement, such as being excluded from company events due to the call center needing constant attention.

As the issues are clear, so is the path to address them. For this to happen, enterprises must change their approach to contact centers and their employees. The fundamental change that will incite a chain reaction of positive developments is to upgrade the agent role from one of the lowest in the company to a mid-level customer experience (CX) function. This will influence agents’ salaries and demonstrate the relative importance of this customer-facing role.

The reason why this has not happened is because companies have wanted to keep expenses as low as possible for a function with a large number of employees.. Agent salaries are benchmarked against other companies with a desire to keep their agent salaries low for comparable functions. However, most companies realize this approach encourages agents to seek alternative employment with higher salaries and more flexibility.

The cost of continually hiring and onboarding new agents has reached such a critical level that it’s finally worth fixing the problem. Further, if the agent role is upgraded to customer brand advocate (or something similar), it will position them to be better prepared for new opportunities.

This is another area where change must be enacted if companies want their agents to stay. Many contact centers require agents to stay in their jobs for 1 to 2 years before transferring to other positions. This policy tells agents that their only way of moving up is to leave the company, which is a waste, as these front-line workers have broad knowledge of the company and its policies from helping customers.

In short, it’s time for real change and recognition for agents.

Final Thoughts

Executives should be realistic about their contact centers. Being an agent is a challenging job. These employees should be recognized and rewarded, not knocked down and held back. Agents are much more likely to stay on a job, even one as challenging as helping consumers, if they see it as a steppingstone toward their future rather than an impediment to their ultimate success.

Reversing agent attrition won’t happen by talking about agent engagement, but it can be solved by altering the policies that created the problem.

Donna Fluss is president of DMG Consulting LLC. For more than two decades she has helped emerging and established companies develop and deliver outstanding customer experiences. A recognized visionary, author, and speaker, Donna drives strategic transformation and innovation throughout the services industry. She provides strategic and practical counsel for enterprises, solution providers, and the investment community.

By Einat Weiss

Contact centers have traditionally been known for their rigid schedules, with agents often assigned nine-hour shifts that specify, down to the minute, when they can take a break or clock out for lunch. Planned by workforce managers trying to get staffing levels exactly right, these schedules don’t leave much room for the surprises or scheduling conflicts that inevitably pop up.

This is all beginning to change. In an increasingly competitive employment market amid the great resignation, employees are demanding more of their employers, including a voice in the hours they’re scheduled to work. With employee engagement and retention, a high priority for contact centers, flexible scheduling has become more important than ever.

Why Flexible Scheduling Matters

High turnover is a constant challenge for contact centers. While other industries have recently seen skyrocketing attrition rates, turnover in the contact center has remained steady at 42 percent annually, but that means that in a 1,000-seat contact center, 420 agents quit every year. It takes an average of 13 weeks to onboard a new hire, with $12,500 spent on each new employee. A contact center will spend a half million dollars to replace 400 employees.

In this environment, schedule flexibility becomes an important differentiator. In fact, across industries, employees who are given sufficient flexibility are four times less likely to become a retention risk, according to a report by Quantum Workplace. And retention, of course, is linked to higher-performing agents and higher customer satisfaction rates. But while most contact center workforce managers are aware of the need to enable scheduling flexibility when employee schedules are created, today’s employee expects more.

The Three Times You Need Scheduling Flexibility

Workforce managers often think about scheduling flexibility when schedules are created, but there are three times when flexibility should be considered to keep employees happy and in control of their work-life balance: before, during, and after the schedule is created.

• Before: Look for workforce management tools that let you enable flexibility before the schedule is created by offering agents the ability to set their availability and specify preferences, based on company needs. Modern workforce management solutions on the market today allow you to set schedule constraints to balance agents’ desire for flexibility with the demands of the business.
• During: Consider a workforce management (WFM) solution that offers intelligent automation. These solutions provide agents a variety of personalized self-scheduling capabilities that fit this requirement with opportunities to trade and swap shifts with other agents, track schedules, and request extra hours or time off, as well as establish how and when they would like to be contacted regarding their schedule. This approach to self-scheduling gives the agent more control over their time, resulting in happier employees, increased staffing agility, and better customer experiences.
• After: Modern WFM solutions can also match interested agents who are qualified to schedule change opportunities (extra shifts, for example) that match their specific skill set. This targeted, automated process continues until shifts are properly filled and staffing levels are at the appropriate level for the contact center. When an overworked agent becomes stressed, there’s a higher chance that they’ll leave the contact center. When customer service demands begin to surge, intelligent automation starts monitoring staffing levels and takes action to adjust agent schedules. This resolves the staffing issue and helps reduce the agents’ stress levels.
  
  You can also consider a workforce solution that allows contact center agents to view their schedules anywhere and alter them instantly 24/7. Features such as schedule trades, time off requests, pre-approved extra hours, and adaptive breaks and lunches put agents in control of their work-life balance.

Extend the Benefits of Scheduling Flexibility Across the Business

The benefits of flexible scheduling go beyond retention to also include operational and financial improvements as well as right-size staffing. Flexible scheduling helps create engaged agents who stay with the contact center longer, control their work schedules, and provide positive customer experiences in an agile contact center.

When paired with intelligent automation, flexible scheduling practices also enable the contact center to predict business demand and staff appropriately—down to the 15-minute interval—to ensure the customers’ needs are met, and salary budgets are not miscalculated.

Agents aren’t forced to rely on their manager to maintain schedules, performance expectations can be met within set costs, and forecasting is more balanced. The contact center avoids understaffing, leaving customers with longer hold times, as well as overstaffing, leading to spending more than needed on salaries.

Managing the contact center workers who are vital to delivering great customer service hinges on getting schedules exactly right: you need the right number of people in the right places at the right time, even as conditions change. But if your contact center is like most, your schedules simply aren’t flexible enough for today’s contact center agents.

By offering flexibility at the three stages of the scheduling process—before, during, and after schedules are created—and leveraging intelligent automation to ensure that your business needs are met, you can keep agents happy and engaged amid evolving customer expectations for speed and service.

Einat Weiss is the CMO of Nice.

By Donna Fluss

The contact center world is in the early days of a true metamorphosis, one that is going to impact all aspects of these service departments: people, process, and technology. Driven by elevated customer and employee expectations, technical innovation, artificial intelligence (AI), increasing globalization and scale, operational opportunities, and the cloud, contact center executives are rethinking their strategies and reimagining the future of these essential customer-facing departments. 

DMG expects contact centers to undergo wholesale changes that position them to deliver a proactive and personalized service experience to an increasingly demanding customer base. Contact centers need to undergo the following transformations to position themselves to enhance the brand they represent:

From Cost Center to Profit Center

Sales and collections departments are profit centers, as their primary function is revenue generation. Customer service departments, even if they do not perform up-sell and cross-sell, should also be viewed as profit centers, as an essential aspect of their job is to build strong and “sticky” customer relationships. 

From Phone Center to Omni-Channel Contact Center

While a surprisingly substantial number of contact centers continue to support only voice interactions (which means they are still call centers), the pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital channels (minimally, email and chat). Unfortunately, too many contact centers added new channels without integrating them with each other or the existing voice-based activities. 

This means each channel is independent, so an agent that helps a customer in one channel cannot see what happened in another, obscuring the visibility into the customer journey and overall brand relationship. This approach makes it difficult for customers who want to use their preferred channel and pivot easily from one channel to another, if necessary (such as if they need to escalate to a live agent). It also makes it difficult, time consuming and costly for agents who must ask customers to repeat their entire story. 

Contact centers should be fully integrated omni-channel (voice and digital) servicing environments, where agents have a single desktop and customer relationship management (CRM) system to handle all inquiries and can pivot between channels as often as needed.

From the Title of Agent to Influencer or Customer Relationship Advocate

Agents perform an essential and often challenging function for their brand – they are the primary representatives of their company to the market. It’s a challenging job as customers are not always kind, and agents may not have access to all the information they need due to system or operational limitations. 

Companies need to approach every contact as a gift when a customer or prospect reaches out to them. The customer-facing resources in contact centers need intelligent automation and tools to deliver an outstanding and personalized experience to every individual in every interaction, and they deserve a title that better reflects their importance and contribution to the brand. 

From Blame Point to Chief Customer Officer: Contact centers clean up mistakes and problems originating upstream and downstream in companies. Because they must resolve a wide variety of issues, contact center employees know more about a company than the staff in almost any other department. 

An outstanding contact center leader will spend a sizable portion of their day working with other departments to address issues identified by customers or contact center analytics. As a result, these leaders know a great deal about what customers think about the company and what it will take to enhance their perception of the brand. 

For these reasons, a contact center leader is an ideal position to become a chief customer officer in their company.

From Basic Systems to AI-Enabled Applications

Many contact centers are still using outdated servicing and CRM systems and applications as their primary information sources. Instead, contact center influencers need AI-enabled solutions that give them a view into each customer’s issue or predict the customer’s intention in contacting their brand. 

These solutions should proactively deliver all relevant data and next-best-action recommendations to resolve the current situation and influence the customer in a positive manner to enhance the relationship.

Final Thoughts

Contact centers have operated in similar ways for most of the forty-five plus years they have been in existence. It’s well past time for change and transformation. Companies must make enhancements and investments, as a starting point, or find themselves with unhappy (and fewer) customers and challenged to find good candidates to staff their contact centers. 

While the required changes are significant and costly, they will position companies to fulfill their promise of delivering an outstanding customer experience, something most companies struggle to achieve today. 

Donna Fluss is president of DMG Consulting LLC. For more than two decades she has helped emerging and established companies develop and deliver outstanding customer experiences. A recognized visionary, author, and speaker, Donna drives strategic transformation and innovation throughout the services industry. She provides strategic and practical counsel for enterprises, solution providers, and the investment community. 

By Jennifer Lee 

In 2020 BP (Before Pandemic), contact center agents typically spent their days navigating between upset customers and harried supervisors. Stress was often high, but the supporting structures of office and colleagues in proximity usually made it manageable. Then the pandemic sent agents home to work, cutting off those vital support structures.

The good news is that intelligent automation technology was already proving effective at helping customer service centers increase engagement, reduce costs, and boost productivity. The better news is that it also provides the connection, camaraderie, and shared culture that agents need to stay engaged while working remotely.

Connection: Teamwork Starts Here

There’s certainly some truth to the notion that “people quit their bosses, not their jobs.” But those bosses are not always to blame. Often, they’re just overwhelmed, and simply unable to avoid passing some of their burden on to agents.

Manual execution of repetitive tasks is a big part of the problem, eating up time that could otherwise go for training and coaching, which not only improve agents’ skills but also nourish the vital connection between agents and supervisors. But when call volume spikes, training and coaching are quickly put aside. This can leave agents feeling like their professional development is not a company priority, which may in turn cause them to disengage from their work. The complexity of scheduling training and coaching in the context of unpredictable shifts in service-level demands got a lot more difficult with the addition of a remote workforce into the mix.

Intelligent automation attacks this problem from two angles: First, automating time-consuming, repetitive tasks yields back time that agents can dedicate to customer service, or to training. Second, an AI-based solution able to process millions of data points can detect idle agents or a dip in calling demand in real time, and immediately deliver offers to complete training or coaching opportunities. This helps maintain the vital connection between agents and supervisors even when they don’t share an office. 

Camaraderie: We Are Family

A shared sense that “we’re all in this together” has always been a useful antidote to the unrelenting pressures of call center work, especially for extroverted agents who thrive on personal contact. In the office, physical proximity made it possible for agents to compare notes and share stories with each other, or for supervisors to detect troubled agents and call team huddles to correct personal or process problems that arose. But that’s impossible when the whole team is working remotely. 

An AI-based, intelligent automation solution—integrated with ACD and WFM systems and able to monitor activity in real time—can quickly identify struggling or idle agents and send offers of assistance, training, or other ways to reestablish occupancy. Armed with real-time visibility into call flow and agent activity, supervisors are free to focus more on the human side of being team leaders. When supervisors and agents engage each other as human beings, it strengthens their shared commitment to working together to deliver the high-level service that customers demand.

Culture: Appreciation Creates a Virtuous Circle

Customers demand a lot, and agents get an earful whenever a customer feels poorly served. That’s not fair—the problem is seldom within the agent’s control. To counteract agents’ exposure to the wrath of unhappy customers, companies need to cultivate a culture of appreciation in their customer service departments. Sending messages of recognition for a job well done, birthday wishes, or offers to leave early when call volume falls off reminds agents that they’re valued as people as well as agents. This contributes to their sense of belonging, which in turn deepens their commitment, which in turn results in better customer service. And around and around.

Intelligent automation encourages this virtuous circle. An AI-based solution, monitoring activity in real time, provides a dashboard of relevant stats—agent performance, relative seniority, and call volume—that helps supervisors guide distribution of the personal, morale-boosting messages mentioned above. 

Conclusion

Agents are often the face (voice, really) of a business, interacting directly with customers who are rarely calling to give a compliment. Anybody can have a difficult day or moment, but when an agent does, it may cost a business a customer for life. And thanks to social media, that negative impression can be amplified further and faster than ever before.

A contact center agent’s job was already stressful, and the shift to remote work has removed the connection, camaraderie, and office culture that helped make that stress bearable. But intelligent automation technology reestablishes these vital links and enables customer service departments to thrive in the post-pandemic business world.

Jennifer Lee is the chief strategy officer at Intradiem.

By Donna Fluss

The pandemic has had a dramatic impact on contact centers, most of it positive. As described in DMG’s new report, Contact Centers in a Post-Pandemic World: A Strategic and Tactical Guide to the Future, COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation by two to six years. This is driving major upgrades and enhancements in existing operating systems, expansion of digital channel support, a self-service replacement cycle, as well as investments in new artificial intelligence (AI) and automation-enabled applications. All these activities were long overdue for contact centers and, if executed properly, should enhance the customer and agent experience and improve productivity.

An Agent Perspective 

The pandemic is also driving enterprise and contact center executives to consider the ramifications on agents of having to deal with consumers. While, in general, customers are pleasant or at least civil, the negative conversations (both voice and digital) take a toll on agents. Studies show that in normal times, fewer than 5 percent of interactions are difficult, but in troubling times, like during a pandemic, the percentage is much higher. 

The degree of difficulty in handling live interactions with customers varies based on many factors, but the challenge is incredibly significant when an agent cannot do anything to fix a situation. This occurs when an agent must uphold a company policy that they agree is outdated or unfair. Another scenario occurs when a customer, mistreated by someone else in the company, takes out their frustration on the agent. Or when a customer experiences something traumatic that they dump on an agent, just to mention a few common scenarios. I have joked for years that contact centers double as free counseling centers. Unfortunately, it’s not funny for the agents who must deal with these tough situations. 

Sure, training can help agents handle tough situations, but agents are human, and it’s going to impact them. Many an agent will talk about how one bad customer ruined their day. And since agents cannot take a break after a difficult experience (because they typically must wait until their scheduled break time), it often carries over into their subsequent inquiries, which is not pleasant for the agent or their customers. 

It’s tough to be a contact center agent. While striving to deal effectively with consumers, management often pushes them to reduce their average handle time, which doesn’t allow them to show the empathy that most of them would, if they had the time. And when not encouraged to shorten interactions, an alternate expectation is to sell additional products and services, even when they know customers are not interested. 

Agents must know the details of dozens of products and services and navigate anywhere from a few to over fifty operating systems while managing interactions within tight time frames. It often requires them to stay at their desks except for three times during the day: their scheduled lunch and two breaks. And they earn the lowest rate of any employee in many companies. The question is what companies should do to address this situation. 

Positive Changes

The good news is that enterprise leadership is finally acknowledging the challenges of being a contact center agent, and we can thank the COVID-19 crisis for these insights. During the pandemic, contact center agents were the first responders and, for a time, may have been the only responders in some organizations. Agents all over the world demonstrated their agility and mettle in dealing with extremely stressful situations while keeping their own emotions and concerns under control. 

It’s great that executives are finally recognizing the amazing contributions contact center agents make to their companies, but this recognition needs to translate into action if companies want to retain these highly valuable employees. Companies should re-evaluate and increase the salary structure for their agents to pay them fairly for the work they do. 

Contact centers should give their supervisors the time they need to be available to assist, coach, and encourage their agents, instead of pulling them for projects and reporting. Invite agents to select training and coaching sessions in addition to the courses assigned to them by quality monitoring systems.

Contact centers should transform their agent evaluations and scorecards to measure what matters most, which should not be average handle time and the number of transactions per day. Last, elevate the overall agent role, as these employees have one of the broadest bases of knowledge in a company, which if given the opportunity, could effectively work in other parts of the organization. 

Conclusion

Contact centers should be employers of choice, and it’s time for enterprise executives to make this happen, for the benefit of their employees, customers, and the bottom line. 

Donna Fluss (donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com) is the president of DMG Consulting, a provider of contact center and back-office market research and consulting services.