One of the most crucial variables to your customer service team’s success is employee attendance. Your queue rate, customer satisfaction, and sales metrics all depend on your team’s availability and responsiveness. Quite simply, you can’t adequately meet your goals and the needs of your customers without your team.

So how can a contact center manager or supervisor increase his or her team’s responsibility and availability? A top priority for leadership on the contact center floor must be this issue – motivating employees to ensure they will be on time each day. But that’s easier said than done. Here are some tips for increasing your team’s attendance record.

Keep in mind, these changes take time. Contact center managers and supervisors must consistently pay attention to these issues, building strong relationships over weeks and months, to see measurable improvement. Conversely, haphazard attention to these areas is likely to result in greater attrition and attendance issues. Guard against problems and build a strong, reliable team with these four steps.

Create a positive work environment.

The contact center management must take the lead in creating a positive work environment every day of the week. This goes beyond personalizing desk areas and ergonomic work spaces to the mental and emotional atmosphere of the work place.

Leadership helps build up the floor by maintaining positive communication and body language throughout the day. Employees work under the stress of knowing any incoming call could potentially contain a difficult situation. Counteract that with a warm, welcoming environment to work in. Employees should feel secure knowing that leadership “has their back” and is always ready to help.

Part of this help is wise scheduling. By ensuring proper coverage for peak times, the manager is protecting each employee against undue pressure. This also helps the manager meet those all-important que metrics of call answer time.

Motivate the employees regularly.

At the end of the day, the employee must feel motivated to come back to work on time the next morning and to make sure he is back from break in a timely manner. And no, the paycheck isn’t enough. A successful contact center manager will use multiple streams of motivation to keep employees enthusiastic and sensitive to customer needs.

Recognition is one of the most powerful motivations a manager has in his toolbox. Be liberal with small and large recognition opportunities with daily and weekly mention. Create a special place for pictures and notation of customer service professionals who hit milestones of achievement for your company.

Build a relationship with each employee.

Employees respond well to managers they know and respect. Be empathetic and approachable, demonstrating in the little things each day that you are in their corner. Respond quickly and tangibly when asked for help with difficult calls or for more information. This growing relationship will induce your contact center employees to give their all on your behalf.

Be consistent with disciplinary procedures.

Make sure that your contact center’s standards for punctuality, break times, and lunches are clearly stated. Remind the staff periodically of the standards and how adherence to those standards impacts the team, the customers, and the bottom line. Then consistently apply warning and write-up procedures so employees see you are fair and unbiased in your approach.

With time, application of these principles should dramatically improve contact center attendance and thus your valuable analytics. Let KOVA help you meet your customer needs with our services and software - contact us today!