Employee Engagement in Contact Centers

Are your contact center employees engaged? Lack of engagement can cause high turnover, less productivity, and subpar customer service. Thus, employee engagement in contact centers should be a priority.

So, how do you turn up engagement? Let’s find out.

The Data on Employee Engagement in Contact Centers

In looking at research into the topic, experts lay out some of the investments, challenges, and opportunities. The cost for one agent new hire ranges from $10,000 to $20,000 in training, recruiting, and lost productivity during their ramp-up and onboarding. That’s a significant amount, so you want to avoid turnover.

Your agents will stay when they are satisfied and engaged. In fact, they are 8.5 times more likely to than their disengaged and dissatisfied colleagues. But how many agents fit into this category? Only 38 percent of agents said they were extremely satisfied, with the majority (43 percent) somewhat satisfied.

So, what are the things that grow engagement and satisfaction? According to agents, the top five drivers are:

Promotion opportunities
Nature/mission
Friends/community
Stress
Breaks

In addition, agents need the training, resources, technology, and processes to feel comfortable in their role and understand how they contribute to the company’s success. So, what key things can you put in place for employee engagement in contact centers?

6 Ways to Ensure Employee Engagement in Contact Centers

If you need to evolve and strengthen employee engagement in your contact center, these strategies can help.

Provide a Great Onboarding Experience

Start things off right by curating a positive and supportive onboarding experience. Things go either very well or very bad here. When you put effort into delivering an experience, your new hires will appreciate the time they have to understand the company, culture, and contact center goals. Even if you’re hiring remote agents, you can still deliver digital onboarding that helps them acclimate to their new role and make them feel valued.

Offer Continuous Training

The onboarding experience should include training on your products, technology, and processes. Organizing these in a streamlined manner accelerates when they are ready to go live. However, training should never stop.

Supervisors have tools at their disposal to evaluate agent interactions. From these insights, they can recommend further training to agents. They’ll get the feedback they need to improve. Additionally, they’ll need regular updates on products and services as they change.

You can have a library of on-demand training, but you should also conduct department meetings where you create role-play scenarios that can assist agents when they get in tough situations.

Let Agents Know How They Contribute to the Company’s Success

Contact center agents are frontline employees. They have direct interaction with customers daily. How they manage each of these and the level of quality and professionalism certainly contribute to company success. Be sure to highlight the connection between what they do and customer loyalty. You can also share contact center analytics to illustrate improvements in metrics like first-call resolutions.

When this is visible, employees feel they are part of something, which is key to engagement and satisfaction.

Welcome Their Ideas

Contact center workflows are always changing due to many factors — volume, urgency, new issues, etc. Your department has to be agile and welcoming of new ideas. Make sure your staff knows you want to hear about ways to improve these from them. As a result, they’ll believe their opinions and ideas have value.

Show Appreciation for Excellence

Every employee appreciates acknowledgment for their hard work. Unfortunately, many organizations struggle with this, which puts workers in a state of not knowing where they stand. Contact center supervisors have a dashboard of numbers that clearly show agents working hard. Additionally, many customers will participate in post-communication surveys about their experience. When there are positives here, you should celebrate them. Doing this regularly and consistently is good for an agent’s confidence.

Equip Them with the Right Tools and Technology

Finally, employee engagement ties directly to the feeling that they have what they need to do the job. Without the right technology and tools, agents may have to perform a lot of manual work, deal with software that has limits, and encounter other usability issues. Frustration can build to the point where employees disconnect because they feel they are working with two hands tied behind their backs.

Luckily, you can give them all they need in a contact center platform that’s feature-rich, intuitive, and easy to use. A cloud-based solution allows your agents to work from wherever, supporting flexibility.

The best contact center software includes:

Omnichannel routing: All customer inquiries from any channel (voice, chat, email, social media) aggregate to one queue, so your agents don’t have to move back and forth.
Intelligent routing: Systems send calls to the best agent to assist them based on customer inputs. It can prevent agents from taking calls on products or services they don’t support.
Dynamic notifications: Your contact center agents may also do outbound communications to customers. Manually doing this is long, laborious work. Automating these functions streamlines the process and removes burdens.

When contact center software is part of a unified communications (UC) solution, agents can also use internal chat to stay connected and get answers quickly. They can also access and share files securely. All these features foster communication and collaboration.

You can find all these features and more with Intermedia Contact Center. See how it can improve employee engagement today.