Simon Sinek on Millennials in the Workplace
The contact center industry is almost obsessed with myriads of metrics, ranging from Average Handling Time down to Customer Satisfaction. Yet, not many companies truly realise, that these metrics can hardly ever lead to a satisfied customer in a long term.
As the infographics suggest, it naturally makes sense to monitor Customer Satisfaction, Quality and Performance but how can you really influence it? In most cases, by assigning well performing agents to particular shifts utilizing a WFM solution. And how do you select the right people for the right shift? Usually based on their vacation plan, availability, and in case of more sophisticated approaches, by looking at their past performance.
Long before having a well performing agent on board stands a long process of training, coaching and mentoring. All done in the hope of educating the agent, preparing him or her for a short life of contact center agent. The only trouble with this approach is that it considers agents as a non living objects that just need to comply with predefined set of steps that would make them a perfect customer point of contact.
What we aim to change in the contact center industry is to treat agents as people acknowledging that they simply cannot please customers without being happy (or at least satisfied) themselves first. I really can’t imagine an agent frustrated by his team leaders’ lack of management skills, sloppy remuneration system or depressive working environment to provide top notch customer care.
That’s exactly where we believe that AgentBalance will become very important – to deeply understand how agents are feeling, what are their energy reserves, if they enjoy they job or not. This is the root case of all performance, quality and customer satisfaction issues.
To make the matter of agents’ satisfaction more complicated, yet more real-life like, we need to acknowledge that agents go through their regular lives, where things can go pretty well or terribly bad. Therefore it is of an utmost importance to monitor their mental state all the time and keep adjusting their assignments as well as ways of managing and motivating them. Just an example – an agent recently diagnosed with serious medical condition will hardly be responsive to any money related incentives.However, what would make his life much easier to handle would simply be a coaching session with someone who understands his condition and is able to adjust the agent’s job in accordance with his new set of priorities.
Make your people happy first. Customer satisfaction will follow.
Václav Martin
CEO AgentBalance
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