The holidays are a stressful time of year regardless of your occupation but they can be especially stressful for 911 employees. Emergency communication centers generally require shift work, overtime, holiday, and weekend work. Working during the holiday season can often lead to burnout. You’ll notice your employees are starting to get burnt out by the presence of indicators such as anger, anxiety, stress, and exhaustion.

A 911 dispatcher’s job is very different today than it was years ago. A 911 dispatcher must be the ultimate multi-tasker. This becomes even more apparent during the holiday season when 911 calls are at an annual high. Help your 911 employees avoid holiday burnout by recognizing the signs of burnout and providing the necessary resources to help them avoid burnout before it starts.

Keep Spirits High

Employee turnover is high during the holiday season when there’s an abundance of seasonal jobs available. When turnover is high, it often affects the morale of employees when they realize they are going to have to work more to pick up the slack left behind by employees who are no longer with your call center. Help retain staff and improve employee productivity by being a positive role model.

The attitude of an organization starts at the top. Try to remain positive in the face of employee turnover to help keep your remaining employees’ spirits high. Remind employees that the short-staffing situation is only temporary. Try offering incentives like increased pay or bonuses over and above the regular overtime rates for employees who are able to take on additional shifts to help out. Communicating with staff on a regular basis is also key to keeping spirits high. Employees don’t like to be kept in the dark so letting them know about the current situation and what’s being done to improve it will go a long way to keeping employees’ spirits high.

Offer Encouragement

This is another example of how you can stay positive to keep employees in a good frame of mind during the holiday season. Nobody likes to hear about the negative all the time. Make sure you offer positive reinforcement to your employees for a job well done. Letting them know that you see how hard they are working and that you appreciate it will go a long way to helping you retain those employees. It will help your employees feel good about what they are accomplishing rather than focusing on all the long hours they’ve been working.

Other ways for 911 employees to avoid holiday burnout include holiday de-stressing activities like performing random acts of kindness, going out with a friend or spouse, or spending some time outside in the sunlight. At KOVA Corp we understand the value of enabling 911 call centers to function as efficiently as possible in order to remove some of the burden that is inevitably placed on staff. Our Verint Media Recorder Public Safety Software integrates multi-channel recording with critical functionality to improve the performance and efficiency of your 911 call center. Contact us today to learn more.

The general public doesn’t often think of contact center work as particularly stressful.

However, customer service can be an extremely stressful profession. Contact center employees have to deal with any number of possible stressors, from angry customers, to ineffective training, to staying on top of new policies or procedures that may have just been put into place.

Add to that the focus on meeting quotas and ever-evolving technology and training, and it’s easy to see why your employees might need to blow off some steam. But how can you relieve your employees’ tension while making sure they remain focused on their work?

Here are a few tips for helping your contact center workers deal with on-the-job stress.

Effective evaluation

Feedback and conversation are essential for the health of any staff, but in a contact center situation, they might be even more vital.

Talk to your employees to gauge the stress-level among them. Take a look around the center to see if you can pick up any signs of what might be causing frustration or burnout among the employees.

The first step in solving any problem is understanding it, and speaking to or observing your workers can help create that understanding. And speaking of understanding…

Figure out where the stress is coming from

Are there confusing policies or procedures that are causing headaches for your staff? Are they spread too thin? Is there an issue with the workspace itself or with specific employees towards each other? Is your schedule too taxing, or are your quotas unrealistic?

Often, the biggest cause of stress can cause more stress in other areas. Figuring out what your main problems are and creating a plan to fix, or at least modify, those factors depends on diagnosing the problem correctly.

Making your plan

A plan, even in a rough draft form, is a concrete way to begin relieving stress on your employees. Even if it takes revision or time to implement, the fact that you’re attempting to make changes will likely resonate strongly with the people working for you.

Goals and expectations

Do you have specific outcomes in mind for the various phases of your stress-relief plan? The more a workforce knows about where you’re headed, the more comfortable they will be with the process.

Are you looking at less turnover or higher job satisfaction? They aren’t always the same thing; burnout is a lot more severe than irritation, so make sure your goals are related to your most severe employee-stress problems.

Encourage support and social interaction

What can you do outside of the call center to foster a friendlier atmosphere inside of it? Do you need more employee events, or holiday parties, or a less formal feel around the workplace?

As we mentioned before, you’re not always going to be able to eliminate the most stressful parts of an employee’s job, so it might benefit you to look at increasing morale in different ways. It’s not just about a great incentive plan; it’s about creating an atmosphere that makes people want to come to work every day.

Planning fun events or social gatherings outside the office might be good way to do that.

It’s important to remember that despite the increasing role of workforce optimization technology, your employees are still the most important factor in your call center’s success. The happier they are, the longer you’ll be able to keep them around, and that will make your center running efficiently.

No matter what industry you’re in, one of the most effective - and easiest - ways to help increase employee satisfaction and decrease turnover is to let your employees know how much you appreciate them.

In industries that run on tight financial and time margins, like public safety and contact centers, employee rewards often end up being pushed onto the backburner. While this can seem like it’s no big deal, the truth is that it may leave your employees feeling underappreciated or unimportant. That’s not good for anyone.

In fact, there are plenty of easy, inexpensive, yet meaningful ways that managers can show employees how much they appreciate their work. Here are a few ideas.

The gift of time

Offering more time for breaks or relaxation is one of the most effective ways to thank employees for their work. It’s true that these kinds of rewards can be harder to offer with shift workers, as is the case with, for example, Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) workers and contact center agents. Supervisors may need to spend some time working out how to manage giving one employee the extra time, while still maintaining necessary coverage of that employee’s duties.

However, the upshot to this fact is that employees will know just how valuable these extra minutes or hours are. That makes these rewards a low-cost, high-value option for supervisors.

Ideas include:

  1. An extra 30 minutes at lunch.
  2. Getting to leave an hour early or come in an hour later.
  3. An extra day of paid time off.
  4. Making one Friday a half-day.
  5. If possible, offer a one-day-a-week telecommuting option.

Small gestures

It doesn’t take much to show your employees that you care about them. As they say about gifts, sometimes it’s the thought that counts.

None of these items has to cost more than $50 (and some are free!), which means you may be able to implement them on a more regular basis. Doing so will go a long way toward not only making your employees happier, but also establishing a workplace culture of appreciation and gratitude. 

  1. Put a personal, handwritten thank you note on their desk or mail one to their home.
  2. Give a Starbucks card.
  3. Give a movie theater gift card.
  4. Give a gift card for dinner for two to a favorite local restaurant.
  5. Have a bouquet of flowers delivered to their desk.
  6. Put together a small gift basket of gourmet sweets and treats.
  7. Offer two tickets to a local sporting event.
  8. Give a gasoline gift card.
  9. Give a grocery store gift card.
  10. Keep one of their favorite drinks or snacks stocked in the breakroom.
  11. Give $50 cash.
  12.  Have a mobile car wash come to the office to wash their car.
  13. Institute a monthly catered lunch day for staff.
  14. Bring in coffee and bagels for the office or your team.
  15. Offer discounts to a gym, restaurants, spas, cell phone service, or other businesses.

Professional development

Gone are the days of professional development being seen as a tedious requirement. Instead, young employees especially are embracing training as an investment in their future. In fact, according to HR Bartender, they’re telling their employers that training is of major importance to their decision to stay with a company long-term.

Basic training that covers a company’s operations, computer systems, and day-to-day functions is and will always be a requirement for everyone. However, there’s something to be said for making further training something that is offered as recognition of superior job performance. That could be preparation for a supervisory or team leader position, for example, or more in-depth training on dealing with a specific group of customers or callers.

  1. Offer a day of team-building to several of your most outstanding employees.
  2. Invest in a day of off-site classroom training.
  3. Offer the chance to take a webinar or other online training course.
  4. Invite high-performing employees to catered “Lunch and Learn” sessions.

With these easy tactics at your disposal, there’s no reason not to start rewarding your employees today. Want to learn more? Read our other posts on how incentives and rewards can help make your organization perform better.

Everyone knows that losing contact center agents to turnover is expensive. In fact, according to Quality Assurance and Training Connection, replacing one frontline agent can cost anywhere between $10,000 and $12,000. And when you multiply that by the high numbers of agents who end up leaving their jobs within a couple of years—between 30 and 45 percent—the costs become almost astronomical.

So what are the most effective ways to reduce call center agent turnover? Here are a few steps you can take to make sure your best agents decide to stick around.

  1. Analyze your hiring practices, and change them if necessary. It should come as no surprise that one of the most important ways you can decrease employee attrition is to make sure you’re hiring the right people in the first place. The first question to ask yourself about your hiring process is whether you’re giving yourself a chance to evaluate your candidates’ skills before you make the job offer.
  2. Although this kind of pre-offer skill evaluation is gradually becoming more standard, many contact centers are still sticking to the typical resume-interview-offer order of things. While this can give you some idea of whether the person is a good fit, it’s nowhere near as useful as actually asking the candidate to perform a simulated call (with, of course, enough information about your company and the job requirements to help them succeed).

    Consider incorporating some kind of test assignment into your hiring practices—it will not only help you weed out those who are obviously unfit for the position, but help you identify people with outstanding abilities, too.

  3. Give employees the resources to resolve issues the first time. According to a 3CLogic article, for every 1 percent improvement in first call resolution rate, employee satisfaction goes up 1 to 5 percent. That’s a pretty positive correlation, and since a higher first call resolution rate also means your customers will be happier, it’s something you can’t afford to ignore.
  4. One way you can help your agents achieve this is to make their software easier to use. No one wants to have to toggle in and out of 10 different programs to get their customer the information they need. Consider implementing programs that integrate all the data your agents use.
    The same is true for those on the supervisory or management level. Workforce optimization programs like the Verint Media Recorder Workforce Management system can help your managers gain insight into every area of the organization, so they can staff appropriately, automate time-consuming tasks, and more.

  5. Offer variety in work tasks, flexible scheduling, or even allowing employees to work from home. Doing the same thing without variation, day in and day out, is enough to make even the most dedicated employee feel downtrodden. Show your employees that you know they’re not robots by offering a change of task on a regular basis—maybe pull them off the phones to assist with another agent’s training, for example.
  6. Another way to increase your employees’ job satisfaction is to offer flexible scheduling, like allowing them to work from home for a certain amount of time per week or month, or offering three-day weekends at regular intervals.

    And if you really want to increase employee retention, seriously consider using at-home agents. According to studies, contact centers using at-home agents experience a 35-50 percent lower employee turnover rate than those that don’t.

  7. Offer opportunities for career advancement. Without the prospect of a better position and higher salary, how can you expect agents to stay with your contact center for more than a couple of years? Agents need to know that if they perform well, they will be rewarded—and not just with incentives like a Starbucks card or extra vacation time, as nice as those things can be. It’s important for agents to feel that they can continue to grow with your organization. If they don’t, chances are they’ll leave as soon as they can find a place that will offer them that growth.

Are you working to reduce employee turnover at your contact center? If you’re looking to make your agents happier by implementing better software, KOVA can help. Contact us about our workforce optimization solutions today!

It’s been repeatedly said, the employees who act as agents within a contact center are one of the most important factors in its functioning and success.  It’s also been said that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to prevent turnover and sustain their satisfaction, motivation, and engagement.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released a finding that the average employee occupies a job for approximately 4.4 years.  For younger employees, that number is cut in half.  Not only is this a costly hardship for the Human Resource department, as it must repeatedly recruit, backfill, and repeat the process of hiring, it also makes it difficult for the organization to fulfill its mission.  How, then, can companies keep solid employees?  If incentivization is a critical element of retention, what makes for a good incentive program?

At the heart of incentivization is the power of recognition.  Though a “thank you” is valuable, what makes for a good long term incentive program is “employee buy-in,” “S.M.A.R.T.” goals, regular management of incentives, and clear comprehension of payoffs.

Let’s break it down a little more.  By “employee buy-in,” what is meant is that if the employees take part in setting goals and selecting their rewards, they are more likely to feel engaged and committed to the bigger picture of the company’s growth.

The acronym “S.M.A.R.T.” stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time based.  By choosing “S.M.A.R.T.” goals, you leverage specificity to not only track your progress but to create incremental and sustainable changes.

As for regular management of incentives, this feature really stresses follow through.  Rewards must be delivered as promised, calculations must proceed smoothly, and the goals should be reasonable.  It’s also important that the incentive program be relatively simple and explained properly so that agents know how exactly to earn awards, gain points, and share their accomplishments.

Finally, make the incentive program competitive and fun.  Decorating the contact center with pictures of pets, telling jokes, and throwing parties are all good ways to bring work and play together.

In addition to these key strategies, there are also a few other conceptual tools that can prove helpful in innovating attractive incentives.  Gamification and Performance Management are two kinds of solutions that are becoming popular with organizations aiming to keep employees for longer terms with higher morale.

Gamification works by allowing agents to compete against their peers or themselves to receive points by reaching particular goals, and can be implemented at a department, agent, or coaching level.  Performance Management often includes gamification, but its main focus is on providing continual feedback so that agents have dashboard views or weekly reports of how they are doing in relation to their peers and team vision.  Feedback is essential for mastery and can help agents acknowledge slumps early and recalibrate as well as feel proud for a job well done.

While there is no single answer for how to conduct an incentive program and every contact center will have its own unique dynamic, it’s worthwhile to plan ahead and take advantage of the resources available.  Kova Corp’s Workforce Management and Optimization Software can also be a great help for resolving scheduling conflicts, complying with state and federal regulations, and managing the logistics of coordinating multiple goals while creating a well organized, flexible and intelligent workflow.

 

One of the unfortunate facts of contact center management is that there is a high employee turnover in the industry. For your business, supporting this turnover can prove costly in terms of the time and money necessary to retrain dozens of people to do the same job. Instead of mastering the art of training new employees, learn how to run a contact center where you maintain more employees than you lose.

Limiting your turnover by creating happy employees is one of the keys to successful contact center management. Read on to learn about three ways you can keep your contact center agents excited and inspired about their jobs.

Require Employees to take 2-4 days off per month

Each and every employee should feel excited about the work they are performing. Sometimes taking time away from your desk is the best way to remember how much you enjoy your job. Setting an official rule stating that each employee needs to take off 2-4 days per month ensures that they stay up to date with family, friends and personal hobbies. Allowing them to create a well-rounded life will contribute to an overall better performance at work, and a lower likelihood that they will quit their jobs in the near future.

Keep Overtime at a Minimum

Along the same lines as the first point, you should outline the maximum amount of overtime that each employee is permitted to work. Allowing overtime gives employees the chance to earn extra money as well as show their motivation in the workplace. However, if too much overtime is performed, employees run the risk of losing a healthy work-life balance that may eventually cause them to quit. Moreover, limiting overtime saves your company money in additional salaries that you would have had to pay.

Implement Incentive Programs

Another contact center management tool is to implement an incentive program for the contact center agents. Practicing contact center performance management can help you to observe each agent’s metrics and customer service skills with each client. By monitoring this information, you can set up a series of incentives that will help motivate the contact center agents to improve their performance. When employees are striving to better themselves, you have mastered one of the most important aspects of how to run a contact center.

Promoting a healthy work-life balance is a difficult concept for many companies to put into practice. Logically, they invest in each employee in the form of a salary and are looking for employees to work hard to achieve the best results possible for the company. Although a company wants to meet objectives, it is important not to overwork their employees. Throwing off the work-life balance will lead to negative feelings toward the company that can often not be reversed. If you are truly looking to reduce the turnover at your contact center, then creating happy employees is the first step you should take. For more information about workforce management software or general contact center management inquiries, contact us today!

No matter how sophisticated your workforce management software is, the scheduling assistance it provides can’t help if the contact center employees slated to be at work disrupt plans by unexpectedly calling in sick. If employee absences are causing a problem in your contact center, don’t give up hope there are solutions! We’ve put together a list of a few ideas you can implement to keep the number of unexpected employee absences to a minimum and keep your contact center running smoothly.

Create a detailed absence policy

Every contact center should have a formal policy in place regarding the number of sick days and personal days allowed, but that alone isn’t enough. Your policy should also specify when and how supervisors are to be contacted when an employee needs to take a day off, whether they need to bring a doctor’s note, and what happens when an employee does not comply with the absence policy. Having an official policy in place that all employees are aware of will give you the leverage you need to enforce it. Have the employees each sign a copy and keep it on record in case there are any disputes, showing them that they agreed to what the policy stated.

Institute return-to-work interviews.

If unexpected absences become a recurring problem for an employee, make a point of setting up a meeting between employee and supervisor immediately after an absence to discuss the issue. Supervisors should welcome the employee back, ascertain whether they are well enough to be at work again, update them on anything that happened while they were gone, and find out what the cause of the absence was. Then they can delve deeper, discussing whether the recurrent absences are all really due to unexpected illnesses or if caused by preventable, foreseeable issues. This discussion may help those employees understand the importance of advance notice whenever possible so that schedules are not disrupted.

Provide incentives for good attendance.

Contact center employees who make that extra effort to be at work every single day deserve to be rewarded for it, and the fact that there is an incentive might just make others more likely to aim high as well. When an employee knows that a small bonus or perk is hanging in the balance, he or she might decide to come in to work after all, rather than taking that day off on the spur of the moment. Such bonuses could be recognition like Employee of the Month or gift cards to restaurants. Bigger bonuses can be awarded at the end of each year at the company’s discretion.

Harness the power of peer pressure.

When someone unexpectedly doesn’t show up for a shift, everyone else has to work harder to make up for it. Let your contact center workforce discuss that fact at a meeting so that everyone is aware of the effect absences have on their coworkers. Simply hearing about the experiences others have had while covering for someone who was out can make an employee think twice about taking too many days off. It also helps reinforce that idea that showing up for work is half the job and a crucial aspect of teamwork!

Encourage a healthy lifestyle

In an effort to cut down on the number of days employees take off shift, encourage the employees to adopt healthier lifestyles. It could be as simple as company-funded gym memberships, healthier choices in the cafeteria or vending machines, or fun classes that teach how to cook simple, healthy dishes. Encourage good hygienic practices such as always washing hands and covering one’s mouth when coughing or sneezing. Keep hand sanitizer and sanitizing sprays/wipes on hand to reduce the spread of germs, especially during cold and flu season. Simple actions like these can make a difference in the number of employees getting ill!

Some unexpected absences are simply unavoidable people will still get sick and it’s vastly preferable that they stay home to recover rather than coming in and spreading their germs to the rest of the workforce. Family emergencies and accidents are unavoidable, too. But the number of unexpected absences can be greatly reduced through the above practices, which will benefit both your employees and your contact center’s performance.

Improving your software systems to better your contact center’s customer service is vital - but you can’t stop there.

Simply putting new programs and processes in place, whatever they are, isn’t going to be effective unless you can obtain and analyze the data that comes out of those efforts. That’s where data analytics comes into play.

So how do you find out if your new policies, technology or incentive programs are delivering the specific results you need? There are several different KPIs your data analytics program should measure.

Overall customer satisfaction

Nothing is more important that customer satisfaction for a call center tasked with providing customer service.

By conducting regular surveys of the customers you deal with, you’ll get hard data on how many of your customers would rate their level of satisfaction as extremely or very satisfied. And while these surveys aren’t always objective, they can at least give you a good idea of whether your efforts are helping or hurting.

Improvement in customer satisfaction

Another effective way to gauge your customer service rating is to keep track of changes in the level of satisfaction over time.

Take a look at the trends in your surveys from before you implemented your changes until a few months after the changes took effect, to see how customer satisfaction may have changed.

Just be ready to accept what the data tells you. Sometimes, the results might not be what you expect; changes don’t always cause a positive trend, and it might take time to find the solution to declining satisfaction. It’s even possible that the older methods you were using were more effective, and you should go back to them.

Customer retention rates

It’s important to think about the future as well as the past, so in addition to keeping track of your center’s satisfaction levels over time, make sure to include questions in your surveys about whether or not a person would use your services again, or if they would recommend your call center to others.

The level of customer recommendation is also known as the Net Promoter Score, and it can often reveal if your changes, your staff and whatever automated services you’ve begun using are truly going the extra mile.

After all, it’s one thing for a customer to say they had a satisfactory experience; it’s another for them to go out into the world and tell others about the experience they had. The Net Promoter Score is therefore a valuable metric for measuring your success.

It’s also important to find out how many of your customers would be likely to purchase further products from the company you represent at your call center. This measurement, also called the Conversion Rate, is another important KPI.

Additional data

Those survey questions are a great general way to proceed, but there’s plenty of hard data you can use to measure your call center’s customer service effectiveness. Has your center’s resolution time improved? How high are your employee productivity rates? How are your employee retention rates?

An effective data analytics program can give you the ability to measure these more intricate statistics and make a determination about your contact center’s effectiveness.

Learn more about our contact center software here.

It can be challenging coming up with a staff schedule at the best of times. Once you add the holidays to the mix, creating a schedule that everyone likes can be next to impossible. It’s a busy time of year and many employees would like to spend at least some of the holiday season relaxing with their friends and families.

When it comes to creating a schedule that your employees will be happy with, it pays to find out what your staff want. When do they like to work? What motivates them to work certain shifts more than others? Here are a few tips to help you schedule holiday shifts with ease!

Ask Staff When They Like to Work

You might be surprised to find out what agents are looking for in a schedule. Some employees enjoy working the shifts that others might consider to be undesirable. Make sure you ask your employees what their preferred shift times are. If you can’t give them their preferred shifts all the time, at least try and sneak some in once in a while to keep your staff happy.

Offer Premiums for Undesirable Shifts

Many employees are motivated by higher pay. Offering premiums for graveyard and other undesirable shifts is a great way to entice employees to take those shifts. You can also offer extra pay (above and beyond what the law requires) for employees who work holidays.

Schedule Vacation Time Based on Seniority

Allow your most senior staff to choose their vacation times first. This is a fairly standard practice at many companies so new hires won’t be surprised by this and it keeps your long term staff happy.

Stagger Shifts and Break Times

When things are really busy, it helps to stagger shift start and end times as well as break times so you aren’t missing too many employees at the same time. This way employees will have extra backup when needed.

Offer Extra Time Off During the Year in Lieu of Time Off During the Holidays

One way to try and deter staff from taking their vacation during holiday season is to offer extra time off during the remainder of the year if your employees agree to take their vacation during a time of the year that is less busy, instead of during the holidays.

Communication is key when it comes to creating a schedule that you and your employees are happy with. To create the most effective employee schedule, communicate with your staff and find out the shift times they like to work, and offer incentives like extra premiums for working on holidays and extra time off during times that aren’t as busy.

If you need assistance creating your holiday shift schedule, KOVA Corp can help. We provide enterprise workforce management solutions to help organizations boost employee performance and customer service in their call centers. KOVA’s Verint Media Recorder Workforce Management solution provides accurate forecasting to help contact center supervisors prepare optimal staff schedules. Contact us today to learn more about our enterprise workforce management solutions.

 

In an age of increasingly technology-fueled contact centers, automated systems can often handle minor issues with customers. This is no doubt a good thing, both for the client and the contact center. But it also means that the larger, more complex problems are still going to need to be addressed by your staff.

This gives them a higher level of responsibility than ever, and it also means that your process of training has to be better, more effective and more thorough than ever. But with so many training procedures and theories out there, what are the best ways to create a knowledgeable, effective staff?

Here are some best practices when it comes to training your contact center employees.

Empowering Your Employees

If you make sure your employees feel like they have a stake in your contact center’s success, they’re more likely to go the extra mile to make sure that’s the case.

An employee that feels valued within the center and that has the power to make certain decisions is much more likely to solve a customer issue within a single call, and they’ll be a better representative of whatever brand your center is handling.

Varied Procedures

Who says that training procedures can’t be frequently examined, evaluated and changed, just like you might do in an employee evaluation? This helps to ensure a higher level of engagement from the employee, whether it’s a new hire or a longtime employee who’s training on new procedures.

Mix up simulations, videos, written training and actual calls to make sure that your employees have as many different situations under their belt as possible. The more prepared they are, the more likely they can handle a customer’s problem in one call.

Why Wait?

And speaking of the training period, why not have your employees handle some calls (under the proper supervision, of course)? It may sound a little intimidating for them and like a bit of a risk for you, but with a fully trained supervisor on hand, the trainee can defer to them if need be, and there’s no better way to train than by having hands-on experience.

Keep The Process Continuous

Training doesn’t end when an employee begins handling calls on his or her own. It’s a constant process of learning, and one of the best ways to periodically strengthen your employee’s abilities between evaluations is to review their calls monthly.

Frequent check-ins and call evaluations can clear up small problems before they become larger ones.

Positive Management Philosophy

Encourage your contact center supervisors not just to offer critiques and constructive feedback, but to praise the trainees when they’ve done things well. An unbalanced amount of criticism vs. praise can create an impression with the employee that they aren’t doing well, when they might be doing just fine.

And who among us doesn’t feel the urge to perform better at their job when they’ve received positive encouragement?

Clarity Is Key

Speaking of feedback, it’s important to make sure that what you’re telling your trainees is as clear as possible. Make your language specific and precise, so that there’s no room for ambiguity in what you tell your new employees.

Not only will it help their development, but it can set a precedent for all of their future interactions with the contact center management.

The Buddy System

Who are the star performers at your call center? What makes them excel at their jobs? Why not pair up your trainees with the workers who have gone above and beyond?

Not only does it give them a chance to see the practices and techniques that will help them excel, but it will also give them an idea of how the call center works from a knowledgeable, reliable perspective.

Incentives

Incentives for above-average job performance are a well-known way to encourage great results and company loyalty, so why not introduce the same kind of program to your training process? It doesn’t have to be a large financial investment; small bonuses or paid time off or a free lunch can be effective training incentives.

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