-- DR. DEBRA BENTSON
1. Be candid about the actual work. Avoid glamorizing the work during recruiting to get positions filled. Contact center work is hard: more specifically, mentally hard. Most callers do not call to tell us everything is great with their service; they call because they need help, and that call for help may be expressed with negative emotions.
1. Become more customer-centric
Customer expectations will keep rising, and with a high comfort level using technology, they won’ t settle for legacy-caliber CX. Contact centers have long been operations-centric, where the focus was on internal performance rather than customer satisfaction. That focus needs to change, where all technologies and investments become built around driving better CX rather than improving agent KPIs.
2. Embrace AI for automation
Contact centers cannot afford to ignore AI, especially for its potential to automate processes as well as customer service. The latter is especially important, as call volumes will continue rising, and hiring more agents to support that isn’ t a practical option.
Today’ s AI-driven bots can handle a wide range of self-service inquiries, and are a major improvement over legacy IVR. These bots will only get better, and they represent the best way for contact centers to manage call volumes.
3. Agile approach for technology
Technology change is now a constant, and CX leaders need to move on from legacy models, where new technology remains static once in place.
As contact centers move to the cloud, the software-asa-service( SaaS) model makes it much easier to adopt new technologies and applications, which is exactly what’ s needed to keep pace with today’ s customer expectations. This agile approach is different from the world of premises-based contact centers, but it will be critical for managing all the challenges outlined here.
DR. DEBRA BENTSON
“ Please stay”... and reduce turnover
Why do people leave? The most common reasons to leave a position are integrity in the recruiting process about the work, how leadership values people, and combating the drudgery of doing the same thing repeatedly.
How can managers help retain employees who would prefer to stay but feel they must move on to other employers?
8 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
The hiring process can include opportunities to listen to simple and challenging calls, meet with agents to hear about doing the job, and honestly describing the expectations and measurements. They should know how they will be measured, tracked, and recorded in literally everything they do.
These steps may weed out some candidates but will help improve the chances that they will complete the training and better match the real needs of the work.
2. Leaders need to be“ people people” because employees who feel safe and happy will stay longer and produce better results. There are three kinds of leaders: those who have empathy, those who can learn of feign empathy, and those who need to be“ promoted to customer.”
Leadership has the lofty responsibility for defining and creating the culture that encourages excellence, giving grace, and elevating the employee experience. This entails building relationships through meaningful dialogs, demonstrating genuine interest in agents as people, and having rigor around not letting coaching become a box-checking exercise.
Train and empower agents to solve problems to boost their confidence, competence, and knowledge that they are trusted in making decisions. Not being empowered to fix things is like a knuckle crack with a ruler – it telegraphs that you cannot be trusted to make reasonable decisions to both the agents and the customer – ouch!, that hits the employee and customer experiences.
3. Disrupt the drudgery of repetition by intentionally infusing their days and weeks with a variety of enriching activities. Offer agents, and not just the favorites, other activities on a regular cadence. Include projects, off-phone cases, cross training / work in other departments, mentoring new hires, evaluating quality, and developing process improvements. This variety will freshen them up, improve bench strength, and reveal their potential.
It ' s true in and out of business that if you value and treat people well, they will stay longer.
"... IF YOU VALUE AND TREAT PEOPLE WELL THEY WILL STAY LONGER."
-- DR. DEBRA BENTSON