What NOT To Do To Keep Your Contact Center Agents Happy

What NOT To Do To Keep Your Contact Center Agents Happy

Many times, we have stopped to think what more can we do to make our contact center agents happy: incentives, empowerment, flexible schedules, free lunches, free massages, decorations, etc.

However, to fix a problem you need to see what’s not working. You should know what not to do to keep your agents happy and motivated. It’s as important as knowing what to you should do. Stop and think for a moment, what makes our agents unhappy and are we doing any of these things. Then, come up with a solution for each of these opportunities. Here are 5 things you should not do to keep our agents happy:

External Hiring & Promoting the Wrong People

In many cases, more than compensation, what people look for in a job is the opportunity to grow professionally and personally. They look for employment opportunities where they will be challenged, where they are going to keep learning and growing. When agents see that you keep hiring external people for higher positions and that there is no internal growth opportunities, they start to feel unmotivated. But it’s also important to promote the right people. That’s the importance of having a clear career path. Something that can make an agent unhappy is being passed over for a promotion. Make sure to know your agent’s professional goals and have a career path they can follow.

 

Making False Promises

If contact center agents can’t trust their leaders, they feel unhappy and disengaged. The easiest way to lose their trust is by not doing what you promised. Many leaders tend to promise many things to “keep agents motivated”: salary increase, a ping pong table, parties, a promotion in a certain time, etc. It’s important to not promise things just for promising. Don’t make promises to your agents that you cannot commit to, because you can easily forget them, but your agents will not. That can make them feel upset and disappointed. Simple, don’t promise too much and do what you promise!

 

Read: Simple Ways You Can Make Your Call Center Agents Happy

 

Forgetting About Feedback

Communication is a two-way street, there is no communication when there is no feedback. Your agents feel unhappy when they feel they don’t have a voice. Give your agents the opportunity to say what they like, what they don’t, what suggestions they have, ideas for improvement, and do something with it. It’s important to make them feel they are being listened, that you care about them. Then, feedback, feedback, feedback. Positive and negative feedback. Let them know that what they do right or wrong matters, that you care about their work, and that way you will be helping them to grow and be better. Important: Don’t forget to praise, give the recognition they deserve, that will make them happy!

 

Poor Hiring Process

Sometimes, you might feel that there are some agents that whatever you do you just can’t make them happy, that they don’t get along with the other team members when they all seem to be happy. Well, maybe they do not fit in your company culture or the job position they have, maybe their expectations, interests, and values are different. This does not mean you need to change your culture, the problem might be your hiring process. When you’re hiring, do you take into consideration your company culture? Their personality and attitude? Do you ask questions that can tell you if they fit in your culture or not? Do you ask questions to assess their soft skills? For example, an introvert person can feel intimidated in a very social environment, maybe taking calls is not what they want, maybe they would be more inclined to work in service via chat or data entry, but they just take the job you offered because they needed a job. By improving your hiring process, you will be helping them to not get into a job they would hate and giving people the opportunity to work in what they really like.

 

Choosing Unqualified Leaders

There is a very true saying about the relationship between agent happiness and their supervisor and/or managers: “employees don’t quit jobs, they quit their bosses”. A research made by Custom Insights about employee engagement showed that managers are the number one reason of employee disengagement with 49%. This is why it’s important to have good leaders to make your agents happy. There are three important steps to do it: again, having a good hiring process, a clear career path, and continuous training. People might say that soft skills or leadership cannot be trained, but what we do know is that these can be developed. Don’t train only technical skills and processes, train their soft skills too, such as communication, empathy, coaching, etc. If happy agents equal happy clients, great leaders equal great agents. 

 

Read: Be A Better Call Center Leader: 7 Things You Can Do

 

At Call Center Services International we want to keep our agents happy, we are proud of having a low turnover rate because this lets us offer a better service to our clients. They are bilingual and bicultural, and they are our greater asset. We invite you to learn more about our talented workforce.

 

Sources:

What Causes Employee Disengagement? via Custom Insights