Staff motivation and retentionIf I am perfectly honest, my strategy for call centre staff
retention currently amounts to plugging gaps as they arise - which
is often! Demotivation and boredom are conspiring to keep levels of
employee turnover frustratingly high. What avenues - either
cultural or technological - should I be exploring in order to slow
up staff churn?
David Taylor
Certus
Take a progressive stance
A challenge indeed! However, there are powerful steps that, if
taken quickly, will not only stem the tide of turnover, but also
make your organisation a magnet for prospective employees. Your
company will establish a positive reputation for attracting the
best people, and for looking after them. First, ensure you provide
full childcare facilities - not simply a créche. Second, give
people the option - and equipment - to work from home if they so
wish. Third, ensure the office is designed in a friendly, community
style, not like pigging pens - adopting some Feng Shui principles,
perhaps.
Finally, give your staff additional interesting work that
involves research or accessing the Internet. Regardless of job
type, people's number one motivator is to feel valued. In addition,
consult and take heed of your team members: ask everyone,
individually, what they feel could be done to make their worktime
of greater interest, and act upon their suggestions.
Dr Robina Chatham
lecturer in information systems, Cranfield
Identify and enhance motivators
You should start off by asking your employees about their work
and what aspects they like and dislike - you need to know their
hearts and minds. You will find that for some it is merely a job
that will give little pleasure. For employees who fit into this
category, resign yourself to the fact that you can do little to
retain them long term.
You will find others, however, who enjoy many aspects of the
job. Find out which aspects give pleasure and work to enhance them.
It may be, for example, the social element, or the fact that they
are helping other people, that make the job rewarding for them.
Make sure such needs are satisfied - I have seen one call centre
left without any staff when management, in an attempt to improve
efficiency, told employees to cut out the "pleasantries" and keep
to business. The joy had gone from the job, so they left. Also,
find out which aspects demotivate staff and work to reduce
them.
A common demotivator for call centre staff is the lack of
technical back-up. If technical support people do not fulfil the
promises made by call centre staff, those staff will feel they have
let their customers down. Get your call centre staff and technical
support people together regularly to make sure they are working in
harmony.
Neil Yeoman
Arthur Andersen
Build social relationships
A recent survey of call centres showed that the environment and
interactions that agents have with others is a deciding factor when
looking for an alternative call centre position. Thus, you should
start by considering the following questions:
- Are all your agents seated in booths, with little team/people
interaction apart from the voice on the end of the phone?
- Do you provide areas for staff to take breaks?
- Are staff incentivised as teams?
- Are there regular activities to build relationships outside the
controlled environment of the call centre?
It is important to have "quality team time", while maintaining
service standards - good scheduling and the utilisation of resource
planning software can greatly aid this. To reduce boredom within
the call centre, you should consider multi-skilling agents, asking
them to take a mix of inbound and outbound calls, and utilising
predictive dialler capabilities within your call centre system.
Mike Portlock
Impact
Use technology to empower
Motivation can be raised by changing from a pure cost-saving
culture, to one where the focus is on adding value to the
customer's experience. This involves a change in style. Fulfilling
customer need and enriching that interaction becomes more important
than simply minimising the time of the call and the productivity of
call centre staff. This, in turn, demands a new style agent who
becomes a multi-skilled customer manager.
Technology, too, can help in this area. Ensuring that agents
have as much relevant knowledge of the customers and their
requirements as possible enhances customer satisfaction.
Organisations also need to ensure that customers find it easy to
work with the call centre - for example, by ensuring that they are
only asked to provide information once. The effective use of good
computer telephony integration enables the operator to service the
call in a way that impresses the customer. With today's technology,
there is no reason why any company cannot do this and, of course,
it will improve the job satisfaction of call centre staff.
The other big technological issue is the Internet. Call centres
need to be integrated in the customer interaction systems that will
become the norm for most companies. Tomorrow's call centres will be
different from those of today. Many of the more mundane tasks will
be removed and the significance of the role of call centre staff
will increase. This should improve motivation, and call centre
management needs to take a leading role in setting and implementing
the transition strategy.
Next Week
More and more organisations are adding heads of e-commerce and
knowledge management to their management portfolio, and I sense
that mine might soon follow suit. On the one hand, I shall be glad
to be free of these issues. On the other, I am wary of ending up as
a dogs-body, responsible only for sourcing staff and supplying the
plumbing to facilitate these more glamorous roles. I would welcome
tips on forging relationships with these new colleagues.