|
Managing a contact center can be extremely difficult work. While your goals to improve business-customer relationships can certainly be rewarded, you are constantly fighting to prevent serious conflicts from escalating, customers from negatively advertising your business with their contacts, and employees from becoming disgruntled with or indifferent to their work. This constant uphill battle can leave you feeling exasperated, especially if it seems like your efforts are not turning around your business's reputation and employee satisfaction or morale are low. To prevent a spiral of bad customer service skills leading to bad customer satisfaction levels, which in turn leads to irritable interactions with your staff, and so on, you need to upgrade your management techniques with a few tips. With these 4 methods of effectively managing contact center staff, you can ensure that your business does not go down the drain and instead becomes a center with which customers actually enjoy doing business: 1. Keep your employees to a script, but allow them to take some license with it. Customers will appreciate a greeting and closing that is reliable and professional, but your employees will understandably grow tired of reciting it several times a day, several days a week, several weeks a year. At a point, their script will become bland sounds and the lack of enthusiasm will be sensible to your customers. However, allowing your employees to take slight liberties--rearranging words or rephrasing them within certain limits--can keep the phrases they need to hit fresh and genuine. 2. Allow your employees to vent their frustrations in a safe environment. As you may very well know, working in customer service can be rewarding but challenging. Some individuals can be inconsolable; others may have irrational complaints or unreasonable expectations. Your employees are guaranteed to deal with at least one of these customers, who will call with a problem your employees cannot seem to solve. Behavioral therapists often agree that while suppressing frustration and impatience is an art form that requires practice, frequent suppression can eventually bubble over into destructive behavior and explosive emoting. To prevent these situations, allow your employees to voice their frustrations with a supervisor. Allowing them to do so with each other can lead to catty behavior and mocking customers, but having a supervisor with an open ear will make difficult experiences more bearable for your employees. 3. Allow your employees to stand up, walk, and even step outside for short breaks. Studies have shown that allowing employees two 10- to 15-minute breaks can relieve stress, wake up the body and mind, and soothe irritable moods. Encourage your employees to stay standing or walking for the duration of the break and invite them to step outdoors. 4. Sometimes, everyone needs a life preserver. However, rowing a solid boat guarantees you are never at risk of drowning. As a manager of a contact center, you might appreciate the services of assistant management or well-recognized customer service staff to assist you with your needs. With WFM integration software, or a workforce management system, you can rely on fast, customizable, and dependable software to collect customer data, record and store phone calls to monitor quality performance, track employees' system usage, operate multichannel communications, train employees, and so much more. More so than your coworkers, WFM systems take a huge workload off your back, allowing you to concentrate on your employees and their relationships with customers, which is your first and greatest priority. While there is no way to guarantee that everything at your contact center will always run smoothly, your role of ensuring overall smooth operations can be eased in the 4 above ways. Allow your employees some freedom with their scripts, allow them to voice customer interaction complaints with supervisors, offer them refreshing breaks, and rely on WFM integration software for optimal employee regulation. Your employees will feel empowered and satisfied with their work, which will pass on to your customers, meaning that you will feel empowered and satisfied as well.
Related Articles -
WFM, Integration,
|
