Gamma Communications : How to get the best from your agents and improve agent engagement

'Happy agents' - equal happy customers'

It's no secret that many contact centres struggle with agent productivity and engagement. This can be due to a lack of recognition, poor team culture, low employee job satisfaction, working from home challenges and failures of basic technologies. Contact centre managers rely on their agents to provide new and existing customers with exceptional customer service, but when agents are unhappy, businesses can risk losing talent, clients, their reputation, and revenue. Investing in agent engagement and productivity should be at the top of your business priorities.

How can you improve employee engagement?

Give them the tools they need to succeed

For agents to perform their jobs well, they must have the right platform to work from. As well as being easy to deploy and use, a cloud contact centre can include many features that will help you support your agents during their working day. For example, the right solution will provide agent coaching tools, such as agents scripts and a library of resources, so that your new remote hires have all the support they need to achieve a first contact resolution. Supervisors should also be able to jumper into agents calls and help as needed, from anywhere at any time.

It's also important to consider that when your agents don't have the necessary information to hand, they can't do their job properly, therefore taking more time than necessary to solve customers' issues, this can be very frustrating for many agents. Having a cloud contact centre that allows CRM integration and reporting features can enhance agent engagement as it allows them to do their job better.

Empower your employees and give them a purpose

Agent empowerment is a divisive topic amongst many contact centre managers. On one hand, encouraging agents to steer away from their script can lead to errors and inconsistencies in compliance and customer care. However, on the other hand, giving agents the flexibility and freedom to go off-script, when necessary, can solve customer complaints or queries more efficiently.

In order for agent empowerment to be successful, managers must find a delicate balance between process and personalisation. It's a difficult balance to achieve, but when implemented correctly, it can both your customers and agents. Encouraging agents to make smaller-scale decisions throughout your customer service frontlines can boost morale and job satisfaction, as it shows that you trust your agents and value their skills and opinions. Trusting your agents to make the right choices and not treating them as robots can also bring forward confident sharing of ideas and suggestions for improvements.

Use gamification to motivate agents

Many contact centres want to ensure that their agents work productively, meet their KPIs and stay within the company. Gamification is the process of using game thinking and game mechanisms to solve problems and engage users. When done right, gamification can be an effective and fun way to drive agent motivation and performance. The TalentLMS gamification at work survey found that gamification makes 87% of employees more productive, 84% more engaged and 82% happier in the workplace. If you decide to implement gamification within your contact centre environment, it's vital that you set clear goals before you begin: use gamification as a tool for measuring individual performance, encourage a team spirit through healthy competition, make training sessions more interactive and engaging, make the rewards meaningful to the agents and to discuss best practises as a team.

Optimise their remote workplace

In recent years, remote working has grown in popularity, and has suddenly become a necessity due to the coronavirus pandemic. Allowing your agents to work from anywhere doesn't have to be complicated, provided you give them access to the right solution. A cloud-based contact centre can give agents the opportunity to work remotely, without any additional hardware required, just and internet connection and a browser.

Given the intense nature of a contact centre, an optimised workspace for comfort and productivity is essential. Ensuring your agents are comfortable in their remote setting is crucial - without a good remote set up, agent's risk having a less-structured environment, which can result in diminished productivity and morale. Providing your agents with the appropriate office furniture, such as desks, chairs, monitors etc, will give your agents the basic requirements to do their job.

Ready to make the move to a cloud contact centre? Contact Gamma today and we'll help you choose the right solution for your business.