increase your call center engagement through … · 2019-06-24 · 6 special report: increase your...

INCREASE YOUR CALL CENTER ENGAGEMENT THROUGH WORKPLACE POSITIVITY

SPECIAL REPORT

2 Special Report: Increase Your Call Center Engagement Through Workplace Positivity

Table of Contents

Introduction—Find Your “Happy Place” 3

Why Your Workplace Positivity Is So Important 4

Common Workplace Issues and Problems 5

Ways to Create a More Engaging and Positive Environment 5

This Is How You Measure Success 7

Moving Forward: Get Positive and Stay Positive 8

Let’s Recap! 9

About DialAmerica 10

References & Resources 10


SPECIAL REPORT: INCREASE YOUR CALL CENTER ENGAGEMENT THROUGH WORKPLACE POSITIVITY

Introduction - Find Your “Happy Place”

Your call center might be performing well. In fact, more times than not you probably feel it does everything according to plan—effective call scripting, decent response time, and appropriate conflict resolution—but your customer engagement is still falling short.

Why is this happening? Here’s a difficult truth you may have to face: Your workplace environment may not be happy.

Call it what you want—apathetic, disassociated, or even unmotivated—it’s not up to par and it shows in your agents’ performances. You may not even see it happening, but your customers do. They sense the slightest hint of insincerity.

Thank goodness you’re not alone. Gallup estimates that only 30% of American workers are engaged in their jobs. Globally, it’s worse: 13%.1 Lacking employee engagement is a common plague for businesses, and it’s especially visible in customer service teams. Unfortunately, this issue can easily lead to declining sales and profits for businesses.

The answer, of course, is creating a positive and supportive workplace for your employees—a happy place. Companies that focus on a positive working environment for their call center employees have more successful customer experiences.

Awareness isn’t enough. How dedicated you are to investing in workplace positivity can dramatically impact your profit and call center ROI.

Over the course of this special report, we’re going to dive head first into the issues of a negative workplace and share some solutions for creating the best possible environment for your call center employees.


Why Your Workplace Positivity Is So Important

In most cases, call center agents are the only human contact your customers will have with your brand. Today’s state of increasingly personalized customer interactions requires you to have strong customer engagement. It’s not just a nice-to-have objective, but rather a foundational component to your brand’s success.

The spirit, voice, and tone with which your call center agents perform their duties have a defining impact that can alter the course of your brand. Their every action and interaction represent who you and your brand claim to be—for better or for worse.

That’s why strong customer engagement is being seen by top brands as crucial because customers anticipate first-class treatment. Believe it too, they can sniff out an unhappy or disconnected service rep in a heartbeat.

A positive environment may help support and encourage your agents through their best and worst days. What do we mean by a positive workplace anyway?

There are many visible signs, including:

• Better employee retention and schedule adherence

• High collaboration and cooperation

• Process and policy conformity

• Notable brand enthusiasm

• Deadlines met consistently

• Energetic performances

• Successful customer interactions

• Better conflict resolution

• Clean desks and workstations

All this adds up, and there is proof. Recent findings by McKinsey showed companies that make a concerted effort to improve their customer experience also saw employee engagement rates go up by an average of 20%.2

Conversely, Gallup research estimates that disengaged employees could cost as much as $550 billion in lost productivity each year.3


Common Workplace Issues and Problems

Just as there are many obvious indicators that characterize a positive workplace, there are telltale signs of a fully or somewhat dysfunctional environment.

Here are some prominent red flags of a disassociated and negative workplace, according to the staffing firm of Robert Half4:

• Changes in attitude and increasingly negative or sarcastic language

• Growing disinterest in company policies and processes

• Increased absenteeism and tardiness

• Reduced cooperation or commitment

• Active rumor mill among team members

• Perceivable lack of motivation and initiative

• Poor performance, missed deadlines, increased errors, and decline in service levels

• Customer empathy fatigue, leading to poor conflict resolution

These are all signs of workers lacking buy-in and loyalty to your brand, two very valuable aspects that inspire customer engagement.

Employee dissatisfaction affects many prominent companies. Sadly, it’s not widely known how to stop the spread of employee dissatisfaction. Gone are the days when companies resorted to threats and discipline in order to get their workers to “shape up.”

It’s clearly an issue large enough to draw the concerns of top executives. Employee turnover and the costs of attrition have a debilitating financial impact on your company when you consider hiring expenses, training labor, and productivity loss alone.

More so, you have to consider the damage to your brand by disengaged customers. It seems, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.5

Your brand loyalty and return business is at risk every day.

Ways to Create a More Engaging and Positive Environment

It’s clear that successful customer engagement begins with happy employees who trust and value the brand messages upon which they carry out their daily work lives.


Here are the essential steps for creating a positive workplace:

Create and share an inclusive vision: The buy-in starts here. At the ground floor of your customer engagement strategy you need a set of guiding principles—a set of statements that define how you speak and act. All call center agents should memorize these principles and know the importance of their role in the company’s overall mission. Be sure these statements talk about their objectives in down-to-earth and relatable terms.

Listen to the front line: Respect given is respect returned. Nothing is more important than showing you care about what your agents have to say. So, close your mouth, open your ears, and establish valuable feedback channels. Make it a routine habit to ask questions and learn what is really going on at the front line. You’ll likely find that these listening sessions are where your next great ideas and campaigns may originate.

Open the door: Physically and metaphorically speaking, you want to open your door and invite employee feedback. There’s no better message you can send, as long as it’s done with consistency. You may not have time to invite everyone into your office for a one-to-one gripe session, but employee satisfaction surveys and the good ole’ suggestion box can easily be implemented. Nearly 50% of workers say asking them for feedback and putting it into action would reduce their desire to leave.6 Remember that follow-through is vital here. People love to see that their comments are being heard and making a difference.

Make their victories visible: Anytime there’s a chance to reward an employee for great customer service, or for receiving positive customer feedback, post it at a location where the rest of the staff can see. Make sure your agents know they are being recognized for their efforts.

Emphasize consistency: Building a positive workplace is a marathon, not a sprint. This means you need to create sustainable steps for making employees feel valued. While you may not be able to give free lunch every day, you can come up with incentives that are practical for your business yet still meaningful to your staff. A consistent reward program is something your staff will come to know and love.

Demand leadership involvement: When managers take ownership of their staff’s satisfaction, they present their team with a feeling of support and pride. Not only is it important for leadership to “walk the walk and talk the talk” when it comes to workplace positivity, their expectations should also include creating open channel for feedback, training, and support.


Compensate meaningfully: Let’s face it, everyone wants to get paid what they’re worth (or more!), but the reality is staff compensation can be equally effective with increased perks. In fact, a survey from Glassdoor indicates that 79% of workers would rather have added benefits (eg, increased PTO, health coverage, 401k matching) than increased salary.7

Add fun and friendly competition: Building a positive workplace can include fun ways to increase participation, engagement, and loyalty. A great way to achieve this is through gamification or taking an existing activity and integrating it into a game format. Many companies feature monthly up-selling contests for prizes and other incentive-based promotions.

This Is How You Measure Success

By now, I hope we’ve inspired you to make your own list of initiatives for increasing your employee and customer engagement, but how will you know if any of this is going to work?

Engagement is a difficult factor for companies to measure. Sure you may have a team that’s performing well on paper, but customer service metrics can provide misleading data when it comes to quantifying in holistic health of your staff.

Where do you start? Plan on making surveys a mainstay of your company’s best practices. According to the Harvard Business Review,8 surveys continue to be a top resource for soliciting and assessing employee and customer feedback, because of the following reasons, according to Harvard Business Review:

• Surveys are still great predictors of behavior.

• Surveys give employees the chance to feel heard.

• Surveys are a vehicle for changing behavior.

One caveat: Be sure you’re not focusing your questions solely on employee happiness. You need to ensure your team is sharing the bliss with your customer base. After all, that’s the end goal.

As global staffing firm Aon reports, “...it’s really about an employee’s psychological investment in their organization and motivation to produce extraordinary results.”9

The following tools can be critical in determining the customer engagement health of your business:

• Establish benchmarks with routine surveys and compare to industry statistics

• Monitor workplace reviews on websites like Glassdoor.com and other social media


• Net promoter score: “How likely are you to recommend this business to a friend or family member?” This single question is the gold standard of customer experience rating and still one of the easiest ways to measure successful engagement

• Capture real-time feedback through post-interaction surveys, either through “stay on the phone and answer questions” surveys or through automated follow-up emails

• Make outbound calls for insight and feedback, and be sure to attach feedback to specific agents in question whenever possible. It shows team members they make a difference

• Monitor online message boards and social media posts referencing your brand

Make no mistake, however, because call center performance—and customer service in general—is today such an asset to a business’s overall marketing success, the factors of training and leadership must come first and foremost.

As Customer Service Consultant Micah Soloman recently wrote in Forbes: “It’s more often looked at as a (quote unquote) lower-level concern, wholly dependent on, and entirely the domain of, the frontline customer service agents upon whose performance service ultimately rests.”10

Moving Forward: Get Positive and Stay Positive

From the takeaways above, keeping your team on the path of positivity takes some sustainable efforts in policy and practice. Probably the most important factor in maintaining an engaged staff is communication.

In this era of profound and ubiquitous digital communication, there’s an expectation for frequent updates and information. As a result, employees will feel the void of information from their employer, whether it be fiscal reports or individual performance reviews. Communication should be the backbone of a company’s strategic measures for workplace positivity.

Here are some tips for maintaining your workplace positivity—once you’ve gotten there:

Manage the flow: Don’t allow negativity to seep in. Your job as managers and executives is to set your staff up for success. Allow them to focus on what they do best and not worry about the noise. This often requires keeping them shielded from the daily dirt your company experiences. Manage the front office talk on a “need to know” basis and keep a healthy flow of communication circulating at all times.

Communicate opportunity: Presenting your call center agents with the possibilities in their careers is an important element to their loyalty and satisfaction. This may


include direct line advancement or on parallel paths in other areas of your business. It’s especially vital for inspiring those who chose this job out of necessity and perhaps don’t see themselves as long-term call center workers. Encourage training and education: Being a vigilant supporter and promoter of positivity of your call center requires you to become an advocate for the health of your agents’ careers. Along with other factors mentioned, this requires you to provide an active program of internal training. Provide the tools for advancing your team’s skills. Not only does this improve their skills and abilities to do their jobs, but it also communicates your willingness to invest in them as employees. One-on-one coaching, group training, and online learning are all smart moves.

Soft skills above technology: Being personable with technology is more imperative than ever. A great call center agent conveys empathy, listening, communication, problem solving, and authority, leaving a customer feeling taken care of and heard. Hiring managers are thoroughly looking for these soft skills to increase the level of customer experience across all channels - both in-person and online. The human touch as we know it, is the human tone as DialAmerica knows it.

Let’s Recap!

Having a successful call center requires engaged employees, and there’s no better way to ensure engagement than through a positive workplace.

Build a plan for earning employee buy-in and engagement through:

• Active listening to what’s happening on your front line

• Shared company mission that highlights their important roles

• Visible rewards and recognition

• Leadership/management involvement in the positivity plan

• Routine surveys and feedback requests

• Strong flow of communication that shares opportunity and training

Stop telling your team you care and start showing them you have their backs. A well-oiled machine starts with having a positive workplace with a customer engagement mindset. You will open the door to increased profits and call center ROI when your team agents see and believe they can make a difference!


About DialAmerica

At DialAmerica, we bring more than 50 years of expertise in providing call center outsourcing services to our clients. We offer a full range of B2B and B2C services. Our persuasive, well-spoken sales and customer service agents work with seasoned managers on your behalf in 19 state-of-the-art call centers in the United States.

Drop us a line! Let’s discuss how DialAmerica’s full range of B2B and B2C services can help your business initiatives. Please visit us online at www.dialamerica.com or call us at (800) 913-3331.

References & Resources

The following resources contributed to the development of this paper:

¹“WHY GREAT MANAGERS ARE SO RARE”; GALLUP, RETRIEVED 4/28/19 FROM HTTPS://NEWS.GALLUP.COM/BUSINESSJOURNAL/167975/WHY-GREAT-

MANAGERS-RARE.ASPX

²“CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: NEW CAPABILITIES, NEW AUDIENCES, NEW OPPORTUNITIES”; MCKINSEY & COMPANY, RETRIEVED 4/28/19 FROM

HTTPS://WWW.MCKINSEY.COM/~/MEDIA/MCKINSEY/FEATURED%20INSIGHTS/CUSTOMER%20EXPERIENCE/CX%20COMPENDIUM%202017/

CUSTOMER-EXPERIENCE-COMPENDIUM-JULY-2017.ASHX

3“HOW TO TACKLE U.S. EMPLOYEES’ STAGNATING ENGAGEMENT”; GALLUP, RETRIEVED 4/28/19 FROM HTTPS://NEWS.GALLUP.COM/

BUSINESSJOURNAL/162953/TACKLE-EMPLOYEES-STAGNATING-ENGAGEMENT.ASPX

4: “5 SIGNS OF LOW EMPLOYEE MORALE IN THE WORKPLACE AND HOW TO COUNTERACT IT”; ROBERT HALF RETRIEVED 4/28/19 FROM HTTPS://

WWW.ROBERTHALF.COM/BLOG/MANAGEMENT-TIPS/5-SIGNS-OF-LOW-EMPLOYEE-MORALE-IN-THE-WORKPLACE-AND-HOW-TO-COUNTERACT-IT

5: “THE VALUE OF KEEPING THE RIGHT CUSTOMERS”; HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW; RETRIEVED 4/30/19 FROM HTTPS://HBR.ORG/2014/10/THE-

VALUE-OF-KEEPING-THE-RIGHT-CUSTOMERS

6: “CAREERBUILDER SURVEY REVEALS MOST WANTED OFFICE PERKS AND WHAT MOTIVATES WORKERS TO STAY WITH COMPANIES”;

CAREERBUILDER, RETRIEVED 4/28/19 FROM HTTP://WWW.CAREERBUILDER.COM/SHARE/ABOUTUS/PRESSRELEASESDETAIL.

ASPX?SD=1%2F24%2F2013&ID=PR735&ED=12%2F31%2F2013

7: “4 IN 5 EMPLOYEES WANT BENEFITS OR PERKS MORE THAN A PAY RAISE; GLASSDOOR EMPLOYMENT CONFIDENCE SURVEY (Q3 2015)”;

GLASSDOOR, RETRIEVED 4/28/19 FROM HTTPS://WWW.GLASSDOOR.COM/BLOG/ECS-Q3-2015/

8: “EMPLOYEE SURVEYS ARE STILL ONE OF THE BEST WAYS TO MEASURE ENGAGEMENT” HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, RETRIEVED 4/28/19 FROM

https://hbr.org/2018/03/employee-surveys-are-still-one-of-the-best-ways-to-measure-engagement

9: “EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT REBOUNDS TO MATCH ALL-TIME HIGH” AON, RETRIEVED 4/28/19 FROM HTTPS://WWW.AON.COM/2018-GLOBAL-

EMPLOYEE-ENGAGEMENT-TRENDS/INDEX.HTML?UTM_SOURCE=AONCOM&UTM_MEDIUM=VANITY-URL&UTM_CAMPAIGN=ENGAGEMENT2018

10: “CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPENDS ON LEADERSHIP, ALL THE WAY TO THE CEO AND C-SUITE,” FORBES, RETRIEVED 5/6/19, HTTPS://WWW.FORBES.COM/

SITES/MICAHSOLOMON/2018/02/20/CUSTOMER-SERVICE-IS-A-LEADERSHIP-ISSUE/#6B57D87848F1

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