10 ways to improve morale in the contact centre

If you work in a call centre you will know that your staff have a tough job.

So how can you improve morale?  James Lawther provides some tips.

Rightly or wrongly, being a call centre agent is widely regarded as one of the worst jobs in the developed world.  Turnover rates are high, morale is low and engagement is a word few understand.  (Yours might be different, I hope it is.)

So how could you fix that?

Here are 10 ideas collected from around the internet that you could use to make work more engaging for your employees.  If you like the idea, click the link to find out more.

1.  Create a purpose

Make it clear what your staff are there to do on a daily basis and make it meaningful.  Which would you rather do for a living: solve customers’ financial problems or clear tasks off a list?

Give your staff a reason to want to come to work.

2.  Make connections with customers

Do your staff know who they are there to serve?  Who are they doing this job for?  What does it mean to their customers?  If your staff know who their customers are and how their work supports and helps them they will take far more pride in their jobs.

Connect your staff with your customers.

3.  Change their job titles

Words make a difference; if you drove a taxi for a living would you rather be called a “driver” or a “chauffeur”?  Do your employees work in an “applications processing” department or a “customer welcoming” department?  Would changing their job titles change their outlook and behaviour?

Words cost nothing but mean a lot.

4.  Back up the rhetoric

If you tell your team they are here to provide customer service, then let them provide customer service.  Provide the tools for the job.  Invest in the right systems, facilities and processes.

Let your employees do the job they are paid to do.

5.  Give them some leeway

Allow your staff to focus on their purpose, not the process.  Let them make their own decisions about what is right for your customers.

Don’t stick slavishly to a process that makes no sense.

6.  Focus on outputs not inputs

Link your productivity measures to outputs and let your employees worry about making the inputs work.  If they know who their customers are and what their purpose is then they will tell you how they should act.

Provide useful measures not senseless targets.

7.  Ask them to improve their own performance

Include your staff in your improvement process.  Give them problems to fix.  Let them think about how they are going to organise themselves.  Engage them in redesigning their own work.

Let them tell you what works and what doesn’t.

8.  Focus on the system not the employee

Instead of focusing on your employees’ individual performance focus on improving the system that drives that performance.  There is nothing more demotivating than being targeted on something you can’t control.

Forget about “performance management” and start worrying about “system improvement”.

9.  Say thank you

We all want more money, but what we really strive for is recognition.  A few words of thanks and a little praise for a job well done will make all the difference.

Recognition makes the world go round.

10.  Start trying some of these ideas

A final thought.

Instead of ignoring these ideas, how about trying some of them out?  There are lots of opinions on how to boost morale, but not one of them will work if you don’t try it.

When he is not trying to engage his employees James Lawther writes about business process improvement at www.squawkpoint.com