Agent Motivation is not all About Incentive Schemes

2,457

mplcontact looks at some alternative tips to help motivate your agents.

Forget incentive schemes, table football and fancy coffee machines and all the expensive things you’ve done over the years in an attempt to motivate your contact centre agents and give them a stress-free, enjoyable working environment – if you want to do that, the most important steps are to keep their work varied and interesting and to communicate with them.

Communication

Let’s start with the basics: communication should be easy with your agents, after all, that’s what they do for a living.  But have you stopped to think what form that communication takes?  Is it all one way, from either management or the agents, appearing as a series of memos, general company updates, advice on handling caller complaints, agent complaints about the state of the rest areas, requests for overtime, requests for holidays?  If it’s all one way, it’s not really communication, and if you do recognise this in your contact centre, then it’s hardly surprising considering how busy everyone is, and that’s good, right?  Well, not if you want to keep hold of those highly trained agents, maintain a productive and profitable contact centre and provide the best service to your customers.

It’s a platitude to say that communication is a two-way thing but this is often forgotten when it comes to your business and your agents.  But by keeping agents in the loop and sharing information on a company-wide basis they feel valued.  We introduced regular update and feedback sessions, where agents, supervisors, client services and management all take part and have created a forum where individuals at all ‘levels’ are encouraged to offer their suggestions, raise any concerns and so feel that they are having an impact on their own work environment, their colleagues and the business as a whole.

We have been surprised on many occasions by the initiative shown by our agents, their real interest in the success of the business and how helpful their suggestions have proven to be.  The key, though, is to ensure any agreed changes are acted upon and seen throughout the business.

Provide variety

Get the basics right but don’t stop there; we all know an agent’s lot is not always a happy one, often bearing the brunt of customers’ grievances.  By varying the work each individual does, if not on a call-by-call basis, but on a daily basis, their interest and motivation is maintained and, potentially, their value to the company is increased.  Train your agents across multiple departments’ requirements and call types and you have a flexible resource at your disposal when seasonal peaks and troughs necessitate a shuffle around of skill sets.

Whilst we think about the boredom factor, something most in-house contact centre agents will recognise, the fact that many companies now have websites that are designed well enough for customers to self-serve simple queries such as balance enquiries, order tracking and data capture means that agents are spared the drudgery of calls that require no skill whatsoever.

But those calls that do remain, whilst being too complex for a website, are still dull and repetitive for a highly trained in-house agent. Some companies will outsource those run-of-the-mill calls, leaving their own staff available to manage more complex requests and build good customer relationships.  But outsourcing isn’t always the answer and, as an outsourcer, that’s not an easy thing for us to say!

Flexibility

By ensuring the technology your agents work with is flexible, run-of-the-mill becomes an exception rather than the rule. We work with a number of niche retail brands for whom customer service is a mix of simple enquiries, straightforward ordering and more detailed product information calls.  A simple one-stage IVR platform has allowed them to filter out the simple calls, sending those to our outsourced agents, whilst their expert in-house staff are tasked with resolving customers’ more complex enquiries.

Our agents love the fact that in the space of a morning they might be taking orders and up-selling for a client who sells educational bug and butterfly kits for kids and then helping a mobile phone customer top-up their credit.  In an in-house environment, the process can be the same; share out the simple stuff across the whole team on a 1 in 10 basis, for example, and the likely result is a motivated, engaged staff making full use of their product knowledge, and customers happy that their questions are being resolved first time.

As the world becomes ever more competitive, so the power of brands grows ever more important, and those companies that help and support their in-house contact centre agents to be enthusiastic, informed brand ambassadors will be the companies that thrive.

(www.mplcontact.com)

Author: Jo Robinson

Published On: 22nd Feb 2012 - Last modified: 12th Dec 2018
Read more about - Archived Content, , ,

Follow Us on LinkedIn