5 Tips to Increase Employee Engagement

For many years in the contact center industry, it was thought that only a good financial return could bring happiness and satisfaction to employees. But this has been proven to be only a temporary motivator. Nowadays, many employees opt for quality of life, believing there’s no point in having a good salary if the overall work environment is not pleasant, or if work and personal life are not in balance.

So, how exactly can you achieve high levels of employee engagement and retention in your contact center? Here are five tips to increase employee engagement.

Tip 1: Recognize and Reward Your Employees

Employee engagement starts with recognizing and rewarding employees. Don’t forget to pay close attention to progress employees make, and let them know the reason you’re rewarding them. This will effectively help to increase the chances that they’ll remain engaged in the future

Some real-life examples are:

A manager’s personal note about outstanding commitment: “Dear John, just wanted to send this quick note to thank you for working after hours last night, here’s a $50 dinner gift card to repair some of the time you lost with the family.”

The manager/HR organization uses performance metrics to decide on promotion: “Hi Joanne, we are happy to promote you to Senior Customer Representative. Net Promoter Score (NPS) has improved consistently with customers you serviced in the last 12 months.”

Because we now live in a social media world, where everyone is connected one way or another, leveraging a gamification solution can make your job even easier. Using a gamification solution can allow you to identify the best performers and create a competitive environment among the employees within the contact center—even when they are in disperse geographical locations. Focus on metrics that will drive a positive employee experience.

Tip 2: Actively Seek Employee Feedback

Contact center employees have a goldmine of customer knowledge. They are the people interacting with customers, so they understand their customers pain points. When you allow your employees to provide feedback on things, such improving a product, a process, or a campaign, it will help the company learn more about key customer insights from the individuals that know them best. As an indirect result, you acknowledge these employees for making a difference and take employee engagement to the next level.

Tip 3: Invest in Employee Training and Enablement

Organizations should invest heavily in constant training and skills assessments. Pulling employees away from their desks can be difficult, but through a fully integrated workforce management platform, you can easily schedule training courses to happen at the best date and time for your employees. This ensures you won’t impact SLAs and will keep employees fully adherent to their schedules. In addition, assigning interactions based on employee’s proficiency levels and shift availability generates tranquility when handling interactions.

Tip 4: Provide a Unified Omnichannel Interface

Believe it or not, it’s still very common to see employees that have to manage more than five different applications at the same time during a customer interaction. This means that about 25% of their time is wasted on searching for data during the interaction. Employees need to have quick access to relevant customer data or the ability to rapidly escalate a critical issue to a supervisor in real time. Providing a single omnichannel desktop application that manages different channels, such as email, chat, voice, and social, and that gives access to the right knowledge,  are critical to the success of your employees and their ability to power the best customer experience

Tip 5: Empower Employees Beyond the Contact Center

As mentioned, employees want a good work-life balance experience when they start at a contact center.  They expect full access to their calendars using smartphone devices, the ability to choose what method managers will use to contact them, and full flexibility to trade shifts with other peers with a touch of a button.

Sounds too good to be true? It’s real and it’s HERE!  All you need is a true omnichannel workforce management capability that is natively integrated to your contact center platform.

To learn more about driving employee engagement, please read the Genesys Skills Management brochure today.

Share: