There’s no question that it’s challenging to find the ideal employee to hire – one who will be a perfect fit for your individual contact center. With so many factors to take into consideration, such as previous experience, references, education, personality tests, aptitude tests, and interview performance, the decision-making process can be overwhelming. And even when you finally whittle the applicant list down to one, your new hire may still not end up working out after all.

Employee turnover can be discouraging, but there’s no reason to throw your hands up in despair. The temptation can sometimes be to blame the company, or even the industry, lamenting that high turnover is just part of the way things are.

But wait just a minute here! What are you talking about? Your contact center is a great place to work! Otherwise, why would you still be there? For that matter, take a look around you. Why would anyone still be there? We’re willing to bet that you have many loyal, hard-working employees who are perfectly happy in their jobs at your contact center.  What you need to do is approach turnover from a different angle. Rather than dwelling on what it is that makes employees leave, you should ask yourself what it is that makes them stay.     

Now here’s the really important part. The question is not what it is about your company that makes them stay, but rather, what it is about those particular employees that makes them stay. Your mission, very simply, is to hire more people like them. The following three steps map out the plan:

1.     First of all, gather data on your contact center’s successful hires – the high-performing employees who are in it for the long haul. What do they all have in common? Maybe every one of them has had previous contact center experience. Maybe they all scored in a certain range on a pre-employment test your company administers. Check the information they gave when they were hired – even down to seemingly unimportant details like how long their commute is. You want to have a 360-degree understanding of what makes an employee the right material for your contact center.

2.     Next, use this information when selecting applicants to interview. Your time is valuable, so if you already know that every successful employee at your contact center had at least two years of previous experience before coming on board, there’s no point in interviewing people without that background. The time you save here can be put into a more detailed and thorough interview process for the qualified candidates. 

3.     Finally, carefully interview your chosen applicants with success in mind.  Sometimes, hiring decisions are made based mostly on “gut feeling.” But first impressions can be deceiving. Be sure to ask each interviewee exactly the same questions, and be as objective as possible when comparing their answers with those of the other candidates.  Knowing from the get-go that each applicant already fits your profile of an ideal employee will allow you to enter each interview assuming a successful match, and that attitude can counteract any subconscious preconceived notions masquerading as “gut feelings.”

Once you’ve hired your ideal employees, it’s just a matter of training them and setting them loose to do their thing. And that’s where we come in. KOVA’s Workforce Management System can help you train your contact center employees, monitor the quality of their customer service once they’re in the trenches, and keep you informed throughout the entire process.  Interested? Give us a call today.    

 

When you monitor calls for quality in your contact center, what perception do your employees have of the process? Do they feel nervous that they’ll be caught making a mistake? Are they scared they’ll do poorly just once and then lose their job because of it?

Part of an effective monitoring system is making sure that your workforce understands the reasoning behind the monitoring, as well as what will be done with the information gathered.  They also need to know exactly what is expected of them when they are being monitored, so that they can prepare. If all these elements are in place, monitoring can be a much less stressful experience for all involved.

So what can be done to improve your call quality monitoring system? Here are five helpful tips.

1. Put the information you gather to good use. You can monitor calls and record data all day every day, but if you don’t do anything with that data, it’s useless. It can be hard to make time to review the information, and then schedule customized training based on the results, but if you don’t, then why are you monitoring those calls in the first place?

2. Focus on the small things. It may seem minor, but monitoring calls to ensure that agents are using the proper greetings, adhering to the agreed-upon call structure, and inserting the desired positive phrases into the call will go a long way towards preventing any individual lapses that can eventually spread through the call center.

3. Solicit employee participation. In order for agents to feel less like Big Brother is watching, and more like a coach is there to help, ask for their input on call monitoring. What would they like to focus on? What would help them feel more confident about the process? What can they practice in order to be prepared?

4. Dedicate one position to monitoring and its follow-up. Supervisors have a lot on their plates already – add monitoring calls and giving feedback and training to the mix, and often, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. But if there is a person whose entire job is collecting the data, analyzing it, and then crafting individualized training and coaching plans for employees,  it will get done – and your contact center’s performance will improve.

5. Reward those who do well. Giving recognition or even a small reward to those who perform well during calls is a great incentive for everyone to do their best on every call. A reward will show employees that it is worthwhile to get that training done, so that their performance improves – their hard work will be recognized.

In order to streamline your call quality monitoring process, why not take a look at KOVA’s integrated Enterprise Workforce Optimization Solutions? With our Verint Media Recorder Quality Monitoring, you can easily record calls and then analyze the already organized data. And with our Verint Media Recorder eLearning and Coaching solutions, you can take that data and customize training for your workforce quickly and easily. Contact KOVA to see how we can help your contact center today.

Think back to your school days for a minute. Were you a motivated student? Whether your answer is yes or no, there’s something to be learned from your response. If you were driven to do your best, you probably had some sort of interior motivation egging you on. Your teachers’ initiatives to keep students interested probably helped a bit but for the most part you supplied the determination from somewhere within. 

If schoolwork just wasn’t your thing, on the other hand, then nothing your teachers said or did could completely overcome your own lack of interest and motivation.  They might have come up with a plan that got you motivated for a short while but it never lasted. Your own attitude and internal drive were the decisive factors in how hard you worked in school.

The same principle still applies to all of us as adults in the workforce today. A manager can only do so much to motivate employees; an individual’s drive to succeed has to come from within. How can managers help their employees to realize this and leverage this knowledge to increase motivation, thus improving performance?

Identify Opportunities to Motivate

The most important thing to recognize is that everyone is an individual, and different things motivate every individual. These motivators vary based on personality and career stage. For example, someone who is just starting out in a career may be more motivated by opportunities for advancement, while someone who’s been in a field for years may be looking for recognition.

Ask your employees to consider which of the following motivates them more (They may choose more than one.):

1.      Opportunities for growth and advancement

2.      Ongoing communication and feedback from supervisors

3.      Displays of recognition and appreciation

4.      A deep understanding of the company’s goals and how their work contributes

Once they’ve identified what makes them tick, employees can craft their own self-motivation plans based on their new knowledge.  The simple act of making employees accountable for their own motivation can be an empowering  and therefore motivating step for them.

Exploring Employee Motivators

Growth/Advancement

Employees who are driven by opportunities for growth and advancement should confer with their manager to identify possible career paths and map out the skills and experience needed in order to pursue those paths. Managers should assist in finding ways to showcase talents or gain experience in order to move up within the company. The employee should also have the opportunity to take professional development courses that will help them meet their goal in moving up.

Having a series of goals and deadlines for those goals will help keep an employee on track to getting a promotion. And understanding what is needed to receive said promotion will help them develop the skills they need and avoid the disappointment that comes with being ill prepared.

Ongoing Communication

Those who crave communication should discuss with their manager how often they need feedback and which methods of communication they prefer, such as email, phone, or in-person. Managers should encourage employees to schedule bi-weekly or monthly meetings as well as letting them know that their door is always open for conversation. Some employees need more guidance than others, so employees who are motivated by ongoing communication are looking for acknowledgement that they are on the right track. They may also want to discuss concerns and offer potential solutions to fix problems. These should be heard and validated.

Recognition/Appreciation

Members of your workforce who are motivated by recognition can let supervisors know about their preference by telling them how much a show of appreciation means to them. To create a culture of recognition even among fellow employees, these employees can set the example and make a point of thanking others for a job well done. Recognition does not have to be a grand gesture. A personal note or a “Thank you!” can go a long way for employees motivated by appreciation. For accomplishing a particularly challenging task, consider a certificate or 

Work Contribution

Employees who need to feel that they are an integral part of the company in order to fuel their drive should meet with their manager to make sure they understand the company’s goals and how their particular job contributes to reaching them. Provide employees with data that shows how their contributions have helped, whether this is in monetary growth or in gaining/retaining customers. Being able to see in numbers their contribution to the company can be a great motivator and make them strive to do better.

By giving each employee the tools to discover and then act on their own individual interior motivation triggers, managers will be doing more to increase engagement than they could ever hope to do using exterior motivators. And in the end it boils down to this: Self-motivated employees feel driven to provide great customer service, which can only benefit the company’s bottom line.

A workforce management software solution like the Verint Impact360 Workforce Optimization Suite provides contact center managers with an ideal way to track and act on employee performance. To set an appointment for your personalized discovery session, click here.  

For organizations looking to establish or convert to cloud-based contact centers, addressing security and privacy issues is a critical component of the planning stages to ensure that there are no major security exposures and all compliance requirements are met. For cloud-based contact centers, availability and accessibility from the cloud is crucial. Employees need to be able to carry out their responsibilities and overall business objectives need to be met. Security threats can impede work from getting done and create challenges for management. And if credit cards are being processed through the contact center, there are quite possibly civil and criminal liabilities with any lapses in security. Credit card companies can hand down fines up to $500K per incident of non-compliance. In order to avoid these issues, the top security concerns that cloud-based contact centers must address are:

Contact center application security can be broken into three areas:

Role-Based Security

Role-based security is an important aspect in protecting cloud-based contact centers. It should allow contact centers to give each user in their organization access to features and data based on their role within the organization. A cloud-based contact center application should allow for roles to be designated to users in such a way that access is defined and constrained to prevent any unauthorized access.

Various roles and authorities can be designated to users so that each person can access the features and data needed to complete their work. Access should be determined at read, write, update and delete levels for all data. It can also be set at restriction levels in terms of skills, teams and projects. So, an agent, depending on their role, may be able to see customer details, but unable to update, edit or delete them. A supervisor might have access to view the performance of a team member or his or her entire team, but unable to see the performance of a team in a different department.

Telecom Security

Additionally, the license owners should have the authority to prohibit CSRs from making calls or texts that have not been authorized to unauthorized calling areas. Telecom security measures should also prohibit outbound users while at the same time allow them to make user initiated calls or texts to assigned calling areas to avoid international calling charges. If necessary, it should also prevent inbound license owners from receiving calls from certain calling areas.

Password-Based Authentication

Password-based authentication is also important to give users permission to access any subscribed features. Any passwords stored in the database should be encrypted. Cryptographic algorithms should be used to verify users. There are many algorithms that are proven to secure cloud-based services. If there are repeated access attempts, alerts can be set up  and the user should be presented with further authentication.

Most of what goes on in a call center involves listening. Yes, agents do need to speak, as well, in order to resolve a complaint, walk a customer through troubleshooting a problem, or make a sale. But in each and every one of those cases, listening to the customer still needs to be the top priority.

In dealing with a customer complaint, call center agents need to listen carefully to everything the caller has to say, both to get a full picture of the issue and to let the customer feel he’s had his say. In helping a customer solve a technical problem, it’s necessary to listen closely to the caller’s description of the problem, as well as the steps they’ve already taken to fix it themselves, in order for an approach to be decided upon. And in attempting to make a sale, listening is a vital part of the sales process, as the agent determines which product or service is right for that particular caller.

But what is the best way to listen? How can it be made even more effective? Here are seven tips for improving the listening skills of your contact center workforce.

1. Help agents maintain focus. It can be hard for agents to keep from being distracted by coworkers’ phone conversations or other external noises, but it’s of the utmost importance in making sure they fully understand what their callers are saying.  Try investing in good-quality headsets that block out all background noise.

2. Teach agents to listen for emotion. Your contact center workforce shouldn’t just be listening to the words a caller is using – they should be listening for the emotions behind them, as well. Sometimes the words and the emotions may not match, and then it may be better to address the underlying tension first.

3. Train agents to ask questions. Anything your employee does not understand needs to be clarified by asking the caller to explain. Otherwise, important information might be missed.

4. Don’t allow your workforce to interrupt callers. Not only will agents not hear the full story they need in order to take action, but interrupting will probably upset the caller, and might even make them lose their train of thought – so that missing information will never be provided.

5. In the same vein, don’t let your employees pre-empt what a caller is going to say. Sometimes people feel they know what someone is going to say – but often, they don’t get it quite right. Teach your agents never to finish a caller’s sentence, or cut them off to tell them they already know what they mean.

6. Train agents to repeat the main points of the conversation back to the caller. It’s a great way for an agent to verify that they have understood what their caller is saying – and it’s a great way to let the caller know that the agent really has been listening.

7. Have agents take notes. While the caller is speaking, it’s helpful if the agent jots down notes on points they want to address, or things they need to inquire further about. This will again demonstrate to the caller that the agent really has been listening, and it will allow the agent to feel more comfortable waiting to speak.

By following these seven simple tips, you can quickly improve the listening skills of your contact center workforce. And once those skills are honed, chances are, the efficiency and performance of your contact center will also improve.

Everyone recognizes the importance of training to the development of an effective contact center workforce. Without it, customer service levels suffer – and so does your contact center’s performance. But what about one-on-one, in-person coaching? How important is coaching to contact center performance?

In order to get the best results from a coaching program, certain factors must be taken into consideration. The coaches themselves need to have been trained in the most effective methods for coaching, or the entire exercise can end up being nothing more than a waste of time. With that in mind, here are the top eight coaching tips for contact center managers.

  1. First, coach the coach. Anyone who will be acting as coach needs to receive appropriate training beforehand – but training often isn’t enough. The best way for a potential coach to prepare for his new task is to actually practice coaching, ideally with someone who is himself an experienced coach.
  2. During coaching sessions, stay focused. Any distractions detract from the purpose of a coaching session. It’s important to remain focused not only on the task at hand, but even on every detail of your conversation, in order for meaningful progress to be made.
  3. Timing is everything. The sooner after a coaching session that the lessons learned can be applied, the better. Retention will increase if a real-world opportunity for practice is available.
  4. Question and listen. Rather than telling an employee what they should be doing in order to grow, it can be more beneficial to let them discover it on their own, by asking a series of questions, listening carefully to their answers, and then guiding them to develop goals themselves.
  5. Give neutral feedback. The word feedback often has a negative connotation. Make sure that the feedback a coach gives is neutral instead – rather than talking about what an employee is doing wrong, try stating what needs to be done. The lack of negativity will help the employee internalize the feedback without defensiveness.
  6. Create an environment of trust. If an employee feels he cannot trust his coach to work for his best interests, and to keep sessions confidential, he will not take his coaching sessions seriously.
  7. Develop a culture of learning and coaching. It can be hard to implement a new training program into a call center that does not have an atmosphere that assigns value to learning and growing. 
  8. Try peer coaching. Train employees on the basics of peer coaching, and then let them help each other from time to time! Who understands better than a coworker the exact pressures each employee is facing? Just be careful to hold employees accountable by having them write a report or summary, so that they are sure to stay on task during the coaching session.

By putting these eight tips into practice, your contact center’s coaching sessions can become truly valuable elements of your training program. And if you need help implementing a training or coaching program for your contact center workforce, contact KOVA for more information on our Enterprise Workforce Optimization Solutions.

 

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