5 Tips to Keep Your Call Center Staff Happy and Productive

A happy employee is a productive employee. The best way to make sure that your company is working at the optimum level is to keep the employees happy.

Call Centers are all about public relations and represent your brand to the customer directly. So it’s very important that the agents have a motivated and pleasant attitude when dealing with clients.

There are many ways of making sure that your agents don’t feel disgruntled and miserable when talking with the clients. The following tips will help in keeping the calling agents jubilant and dedicated:

Enable Multi-Channel Communication Services

These days, customers are inclined to interact with the agents via a variety of communication channels, be it phone, email, live chat or even SMS. Each customer has a preferred way of communication that feel the most comfortable in whilst interacting with agents.

However many agents find interacting with clients via different mediums taxing. So make sure you provide them with a means to handle the clients’ requests via any channel on the same medium.

If you provide them with a multi-channel tool which can compile information from the interactions on all of these channels, the agents will be able to happily handle all the requests made out by the clients. Moreover the ability to remain handy will help in improving the overall service quality provided by your organization.

Provide lucrative benefits and incentives

Working in Call Centers can be very challenging as well as toiling for the agents. A rude client can bitter their mood for the whole day. This is why it is very important to make sure that the employees are motivated enough to ignore such bitter instances.

Benefits and incentives should be gifted to agents to sweeten their job. A well detailed medical package is a must so that agents need not worry about their health.

Moreover, agents working on sales-related accounts should be rewarded with incentives. Aside from their salaries, agents should get additional money for completing sales quotas or other milestones. This keeps them focused and allows them to neglect bad behaviors from clients.

Promote growth opportunities

While it’s a very good entry level position, most people don’t want to be calling agents for the rest of their working lives. They look for opportunities that can steer their career up the corporate ladder.

A good call center should ensure that it provides its agents the chance to increase their skill set and thereby become eligible for higher positions in the company.

Agents prefer working in an environment that helps them grow. They are more likely to stay in the same organization if they know that their hard work will be rewarded with promotions and thus are happier in doing their jobs.

Allowing them to work from home

If agents are allowed to spend some time working from home, it not only makes them happier but adds to their productivity as well. The flexibility of this method allows them to maximize their working time, which might have been wasted in travels, and also displaying trust in them.

Cloud-based phone system can make this easy to implement as they permit remote access to the needed services. The operations are not affected at all neither is the customer management while at the same time the calls can  continue to be recorded as if the calls were made from the office itself.

Monitor the calls and promote manager interactions

Monitoring the calls made by agents is essential. Frequently listening to these calls and providing a positive feedback when merited is not only constructive to the organizations but to the morale of the agents as well. It helps the agents to learn the technologies, learn new skills and to keep them motivated.

Moreover, having these agents listen to their own calls gives them a better perspective and makes them a part of addressing the areas that need improvement in the overall working of the organization.

Besides monitoring, managers also play a pivotal role in keeping the agents happy and motivated. They should lead by example. Having the managers prepared to take on calls in case of peaks or surges in call volumes is a major factor for the long-term productivity of the call center.

Conclusion

Keeping the call agents happy and inspired is mandatory if call centers want to succeed in their business. Providing a good working environment is not only beneficial to the morale of the agents but is also productive towards having the best business efficiency.