What role can incentives play in motivation enhancement?

Incentives can go a long way in making agents feel valued and part of a winning team. Incentives come in many forms:

• Sales Incentives: Give your agents a commission for closing sales or achieving other business successes.

• Bonuses: Whether cash, gift cards or prizes, bonuses recognize agents who have reached a performance, attendance, job-anniversary date or other critical milestone.

• Contests: Sales organizations often use contests to reward individuals who meet specific performance goals. The approach works just as well in a call center.

• Intangible Rewards: Agents who meet minor performance goals can be rewarded with time for playing computer games, an extended lunch break or a preferred parking space.

• Promotions: A prestigious job title like “Senior Support Agent” costs nothing yet tells the individual that their experience and performance is valued by the organization.

• Career Guidance: Besides a better job title, top performers should be rewarded with career track incentives, such as additional training opportunities and work responsibilities. These actions will assure your highfliers that their productivity is leading them toward greater opportunities within the organization.

Incentives aren’t the only way of motivating agents, but they’re powerful tools that when carefully applied can be used to build a more productive work force.

How do I know what agents really want?

The best way to know what agents want is to listen to what they have to say.

This can be accomplished through surveys and focus groups that enable agents to vent their complaints and express their needs.

Be sure to include a cross-section of all agents in your outreach initiatives: new hires, veterans, high-performers, laggards, the disgruntled and the jubilant.

What effect does call-center culture have on agent motivation?

Agents take their cues from call-center bosses. Managers and supervisors who appear tired, distracted, angry or bored are hardly great motivators.

Building agent enthusiasm requires a management team that’s involved, responsive, and ready to take on projects with energy and enthusiasm. Bosses should exude excitement over small success and acknowledge agents’ contributions.

Will better morale automatically lead to lower turnover?

Enhanced morale can reduce staff churn by increasing satisfaction. Few agents will leave a job simply because a competitor pays 25 or 50 cents more per hour.

On the other hand, low turnover isn’t necessarily indicative of a productive work force. Underachieving agents may feel perfectly happy in their work and not be tempted by greener pastures, particularly if they believe their jobs aren’t at risk.

Call-center managers must recognize the difference between agent satisfaction and complacency, and be willing to weed out low-scoring agents despite the potential negative impact on staff churn.

When it comes to call-center agents, morale and motivation are closely interlinked. Morale is the enthusiasm agents have for their work. When agents feel valued and satisfied, those emotions tend to be reflected in their performance and they become motivated.

What is the best way to boost agent motivation?

There is no one “best way” to increase motivation. Morale plays a big role. The four basic areas that affect agent motivation are:

• Physical Environment:
  • Is the call center located in a safe neighborhood?
  • Is the facility clean and well organized?
  • Is it modern and attractive?
  • Is it sufficiently heated and cooled

• Working Environment:
  • Is the furniture and equipment in good working order?
  • Do the fixtures support the agents or work against them?

• Intellectual Environment:
  • Do the agents have the training and coaching they need to do their job?
  • Are call-center rules logical and well stated, or just a hodgepodge of decrees that have accumulated over the years?

• Emotional Environment:
  • Are supervisors responsive to agents’ questions?
  • Are they supportive in tough times?
  • Do they admit mistakes?
  • Are they flexible enough to bend the rules in extraordinary situations?

Nice Systems

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How to make Effective Use of Customer Feedback Webinar

Most organizations understand the importance of obtaining feedback to gain a true perspective of how well they meet their customers’ expectations. However, interpreting survey results and using that knowledge effectively is often difficult. Doing this successfully requires a deeper understanding of the context in which a customer’s responses were given.

Using real-world examples this session examines how an integrated customer feedback/quality management system provides this insight, and how that can be used to affect real improvement.

In this session we explore:

• The pros and cons of different customer feedback solutions
• How to gain a fuller understanding of the fundamental reasons behind responses
• Methods to ensure agent performance aligns with customer expectations
• The ultimate source of customer feedback – call recordings

Register online for the How to make Effective Use of Customer Feedback webinar.

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How to Improve Your Agent Retention:

Effective Best Practices to Reduce Agent Turnover

There is no single reason for high turnover in contact centers. Common reasons include; schedule poor relationships between agents and supervisors, incorrect hiring decisions, lack of career path, poor skills development, and the list goes on. Some of these are just a contact center fact of life. Contact centers can be stressful places to work, and many of the agents are a flight risks to start with. Moreover, the sheer volume of hiring all but guarantees that a large percentage of bad hires will slip through the cracks.

But for the agents who want to be there—and who you most want to keep—there is a new approach that has proven effective in increasing agent satisfaction and reducing attrition in service organizations in the highest volume industries.

Join Enkata to hear an educational Webinar sharing the latest best practices for reducing agent turnover.

The speakers will cover:

• Building trusted and productive relationships between supervisor and agents
• Creating incentive for agents to stay
• Helping your agent understand their part in impacting their companies success

Register online for the How to Improve Your Agent Retention webinar.

Too many KPIs and not enough performance. Does this problem sound familiar?

Many organizations today face this challenge as contact centers, and front- and back-office operations deliver a flood of performance data to the enterprise. Although this abundance of information provides some insight into “what” is going on, it has traditionally failed to answer the more important questions of “why?”

Today, new advances in performance management combine the power of performance analytics and speech analytics, enabling organizations to make sense of data to enhance performance across contact center, back-office and enterprise departments.

The goal of any performance-management solution should be to help organizations improve service, increase customer satisfaction and drive more profitable operations.

With the wealth of information pouring out of the contact center and back offices, performance-management solutions enable organizations to more easily identify the performance indicators that are most important to the organization, effectively changing performance management from a metrics-driven to results-driven initiative.

1. Performance Analytics
   Early performance-management information was often driven out of the finance department, the customer contact center or IT department. Today, performance analytics combine data from a variety of systems across the enterprise, including customer and operational databases such as CRM and ERP, to identify the most important KPIs that influence the most impactful behaviors and processes. Performance analytics sort through an array of operational metrics – productivity, service levels, throughput, backlog, quality – and deliver performance intelligence via a powerful dashboard. Armed with targeted KPIs, executives are empowered to make smarter decisions on the most effective ways to enhance overall operational performance.
2. Customer Interaction Analytics
   Performance management should also leverage the voice of the customer as a key source of performance intelligence. Organizations can leverage customer interactions captured in the contact center, and front- and back-office for insight into ongoing customer issues, process breakdowns and service challenges. The introduction of speech analytics into performance management delivers insight into the root causes of performance trends — from average handle time and first call resolution to customer defections and sales conversion rates. This actionable intelligence enables individuals to adopt more efficient processes, learn new skills and drive enterprisewide business performance.
3. Consulting and Training Services
   In addition to analytics technology, performance management should also include a consulting services program designed to apply this performance and customer intelligence to optimize business processes, enhance performance training and improve customer loyalty and retention. Because performance management touches departments throughout the enterprise, it is important that every layer of the organization is engaged in the execution of these process changes, from senior managers to individual service providers. Consultants can use proven best practices developed in extensive enterprise customer engagements to deliver deep expertise, from transaction and claims processing to finance, billing, marketing and sales.

In today’s complex contact centers and back-office processing areas, more timely and informed decisions can transform the results of enterprise performance. With the explosion of metrics from an ever-growing number of enterprise systems, executives can use analytics-driven performance management to deliver actionable intelligence and decipher which KPIs are really key and why.

By Mariann McDonagh, vice president, global marketing, Verint Systems Inc. Verint Systems is a leading global provider of analytic software-based solutions for communications interception, networked video and business intelligence.