Category: Customer Experience

A company’s work environment isn’t just about air conditioning, water cooler chats, and table tennis. Employees, especially call center agents, spend a significant portion of their lives at work. Your call center or contact center environment plays a big role in how engaged your agents are in their day-to-day work.
How to Foster Agent Engagement in a Hybrid Contact Center
What is a healthy work environment?
Healthy work environments are usually positive workplaces that value employee health and wellness, education, growth, and goal achievement. Employees that work in positive environments usually perform better, and feel more happy and comfortable.
Some common attributes of a healthy work environment include:

Recognition and praise.
Physically comfortable workspace.
Open communication.
Encouraging career growth.
Work-life balance.

Some common attributes of an unhealthy work environment include:

Workplace gossip.
Micromanagement.
Burnt out employees.
Little to no career growth or learning opportunities.
High employee turnover.

How does a call center environment affect agents?
A work environment plays a great role in a company’s culture, productivity, and overall success. It also impacts employee engagement and retention. Did you know that 58% of employees who have quit their jobs cited negative office politics as a reason? Contrarily, 58% of employees said they would stay working for a company with a lower salary if they had a great boss.
Here are some ways that your work environment affects your agents:

Productivity.
Customer experience.
Agent morale.
Agent turnover.

DID YOU KNOW?
Visual IVR, Voice Call-Backs, and Smart Routing are all great tools to decrease call volume, improve customer satisfaction, and in turn, improve agent productivity and overall work experience.

8 tips for creating an ideal call center environment.
Your call center environment affects so many key functions of your operations. Agent turnover, customer experience, morale, and productivity are all vital components of a call center that you should make sure are in a good state. Here are some tips to improve your call center environment:
1. Have a clear vision and values.
Your team vision and values are great tools to motivate call center agents, assist them in decision-making, and unite them as a team.
A clear vision defines a call center’s purpose and future goals. Strong values guide your workplace culture, and help you attract talent with similar values. Your management team should be transparent on how agents can adopt these values and answer any questions they might have.
2. Create a comfortable and inviting workspace.
Do you feel at ease physically and emotionally in the call center? If you don’t, chances are your agents don’t either.
Your work environment should be comfortable because your agents spend so much time there. Evaluate the desks, chairs, lighting, air quality, and noise levels to ensure they’re conducive to a productive environment for your team.
If anything feels uncomfortable, make some upgrades. Improve your air ventilation, or invest in some ergonomic chairs. These upgrades can make agents feel drastically better at work each day. Also, give your agents some freedom in how they personalize their space. Photos of loved ones and plants might make them feel more comfortable.
How to Create a Call Center Performance Report
3. Recognize agents for strong performance.
Don’t just focus on sales goals and revenue. Your agents will not appreciate being seen as workhorses. Recognition and praise are part of any healthy work environment, and also improve agent engagement. Your agents provide excellent customer support and go above and beyond to ensure a great customer experience.
Find ways to recognize your agents for the great work they do each day. If you notice impeccable service in your call monitoring or see positive customer service reviews online, use that as an excuse to celebrate! Say thank you, and offer your agents praise and rewards for a job well done. It can be as small as a free lunch or an earlier end to a shift. Or, you could go one step further and develop a performance incentive program.
4. Encourage collaboration.
Your work environment is more positive when people are collaborating. As a manager, you’re responsible for giving your agents opportunities to come together and feel connected, while also fulfilling your call center goals.
Make time for team-building exercises, group projects, joint outings, parties, and other events to keep your team connected. This is especially necessary if any of your team is working from home.
5. Offer training and learning opportunities.
Your agents will have more confidence in serving customers if they have the proper training. Don’t just provide training during onboarding – put focus on providing ongoing learning opportunities so your agents can stay up to date with product/service knowledge, best practices, and more.
By offering your agents tips and tricks throughout their tenure, it gives them the opportunity to consistently improve. Explore call center training workshops, conferences, and mentoring to provide more learning opportunities.
5 Best Practices for Training Remote Call Center Agents
6. Communicate well, and often.
Your agents spend most of their workday on the front lines talking to customers. So, it’s easy for them to feel disconnected from management and the team – especially if they are working remotely.
Managers and leaders must communicate well and often with their agents, especially before making decisions about call center operations. Lack of communication can breed distrust and low morale, both of which contribute to a negative work environment.
Host regular meetings to listen to your agents’ feedback, observations, and opinions. In turn, managers can discuss their operational goals and use agents’ input to inform operational decisions. You might also consider investing in strong messaging chat software to encourage communication between team members.

TIP:
Regular communication is great, but it should also be clear. Make sure you share your call center’s performance goals and desired agent objectives immediately. Your agents should know exactly what you expect from them, and feel empowered to pursue their goals.

7. Schedule effectively.
Strategic scheduling makes a world of a difference in agent satisfaction and call center productivity. Ensure you have a proper call volume forecast set up to aid your scheduling efforts.
Make sure you have enough agents, including agents with experience, for times of immense call volume. Avoid scheduling newer agents during peak periods, so they aren’t left overwhelmed. You should also account for regular breaks to ensure your agents don’t burn out.
8. Invest in technology.
Proper technology is essential for agents to do their jobs well. If your office computers are slow and outdated, your agents will find difficulty even in the most straightforward tasks. That’s why it’s so important to assess your technology regularly and make the required upgrades.
You should also invest in the right call center technology to keep your call center operations productive and your agents at top efficiency. This will improve your work environment, since your team members will have one less reason to find something negative about work.
Top Call Center Technologies to Boost Call Center Agent Engagement
Conclusion.
Your call center’s efficiency and productivity come down to how your agents feel in their work environment. Improve agent morale and satisfaction by investing in their workspace and taking the time to improve their day-to-day work.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

If we’re hungry, the obvious solution is to eat something.

If we’re restless, it pays to get up and walk around.

Is stress different?

Along the way, it seems as though we got confused about the best way to deal with the stress that comes from work and from the projects we work on.

“Push through the stress and on the other side, everything will be okay.”

Simply get all the details right, get an A, get into a famous college, make the sale, polish the logo, do the pitch and then… reassurance will follow.

The reassurance of success or even survival. The reassurance of external acclaim or simply relief.

Now that everything’s okay, no need to be stressed!

Until the next time. Which might be tomorrow.

Reassurance is futile, because there’s never enough of it.

Some folks manage to get their projects done without this sort of stress. They’re not using the search for reassurance as fuel.

The solution to stress isn’t reassurance. It’s accurately understanding the world as it is, and making choices about what we do and how we do it. But far more than that, we relieve stress by making choices about the stories we tell ourselves.

What’s the difference between giving a speech to your dog and giving one on the TED stage? It’s the same speech. The difference is in the story we tell ourselves about the stakes, the opportunity and what might happen next. If that story gets debilitating enough, it can paralyze us.

If you’re on a backpacking trip, there’s little doubt that ten more minutes of tired to get to the next campsite is a smart investment. A little more tired translates into a lot more rest.

But if you’re at work, there’s not a lot of evidence that more stress is the best way to have less stress.

Look for the story instead.

[PS It’s not easy to change your story. For some people, and in some situations, it’s almost impossible. But that doesn’t mean that more stress in search of reassurance is going to make your search for a useful story any easier. If others in your situation have figured out a story that works for them, that’s a good sign that you might find one too. If no one has, changing your situation (if you can) might be the best way forward. But we need to get unhooked from the cycle of reassurance.]

Looking for a brainstorm here, let’s say you send a message to a company asking for help with anything regarding their product or service, and then you get a reply. What traits of your original message or the message you received back from a customer support agent would you consider indicative of a positive or negative experience? Btw this is for a data science project I’m doing for an internship where I’m training a logistic regression model to predict how a customer will rate their support experience. Some examples would be:
The support agent’s years of experience What day of the week the customer sent their message/received their reply (I found out that Mondays really do suck) How many “angry” words the customer used in their original message

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Solving a problem puts value creation first.

Who’s it for?

What problem does it solve?

Would we miss it if you didn’t build it?

At the beginning of the web, companies grew by focusing on the problems that their users had.

As a result, people found a partner, a place to chat, a way to buy a book they’d been searching for, and yes, a chance to sell their Beanie Baby collection. They listed jobs and found them, sent messages around the world and looked up information they needed. There wasn’t always a business model, but the successful startups got successful because they were relentlessly focusing on solving a problem for the customer.

If it was hard to explain why someone needed what you were doing, you had a real problem.

This was the single best use of the venture money that flowed into the web twenty-five years ago. Patient investors said, “solve a customer problem well enough and the profit will take care of itself.”

In just a few decades, a lot of the straightforward problems found profitable outcomes.

Many small businesses run into trouble because they start in a different place–the question they ask is: how does the owner make a living? Serving the customer comes second when the owner is focused too much on sunk costs and bills due.

Over time, successful businesses figure out how to align their goals with the customers they serve.

Even Beanie Babies solved a problem for someone.

The global pandemic has affected attitudes toward work-life balance and introduced flexible work culture. Research from EY uncovered that almost half of the interviewed employees would leave their current jobs if they were not given flexible working opportunities. Moreover, nine in ten employees want flexibility in both when and where they work. These numbers show…
The post Build flexible work culture to enable mental well being appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

The internet is filled with puppy quandaries.

You can get a puppy at a pet mill/pet shop in about an hour (please don’t). But over the course of your lifetime with that dog, you’ll need about 3,000 hours of time and money to take care of him.

The same time/money math applies to doing a good job on any social network. It only takes a few minutes to sign up for an account, but most users put in just enough time to be wasteful and not nearly enough time to generate anything of value as a result.

Accepting international orders, supporting a different category of industrial customers, putting your customer service phone number on the box, opening a conflict or litigation–these are all puppy questions.

The cool kids waste a lot of time because they forgot to think about them.

It’s such a hard thing to be honest about.

Because money is tied into status, possibility, self-worth, connection, sustenance and more.

How many people would be doctors if being a doctor was something you couldn’t get paid for?

How many artists would mint NFTs if they couldn’t sell them? How many people would buy them if they couldn’t resell them?

Or the flipside: If someone paid you to say ‘thanks’ or to help them cross the street or to go to a family gathering, how would that feel?

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If you call tech support, it’s likely that they’ll ask you to turn your computer on and off.
That’s not because this step often fixes the problem, but if it does, you’ve found a very fast way to get back to work.
The idea of the easy test is often ignored. Before spending three years in law school, why not get a temp job for a week at a law firm? Or spend a day reading depositions on file at the courthouse?
If we can’t figure out how to understand and support a simple small business, it doesn’t make sense to spend our time decoding a complex large one.
And if you want to make a feature film, figure out how to create a delightful three-minute short first.
The ocean is made of drops. Start with those, not the waves.
Complicated civil interactions are built on top of successful small ones.

Every time I have to use a Google product: Calendar, Hangouts or Chrome, load takes ages. Now windows is ……… still windows.
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