Workforce Management

Agents motivation. Key in Contact Center operations

By 16 de marzo de 2015marzo 25th, 2021No Comments

Anyone that manages a call center knows the importance of the human factor. The team motivation and training are key to achieve the established objectives.

But this is not easy, in fact in might be one of the most challenging issues when managing a service.

There are several aspects that count towards agent motivation that can have a direct impact on the results. To make it simple we can divide them in two. One that would address the agent directly: incentive program, work environment, acknowledgements etc.

And another one that even though does not impact directly it makes a huge difference in the day to day work of agents and when properly done prevents them from frustration.

DB quality: Agents generally  want to do their job the best way possible, they want to reach prospects and close the sale, in an outbound service a poor quality DB can be as a frustrating as trying to sell a useless product. Is the supervisor responsibility to guarantee the DB quality and if not, to enable a profiling campaign with different objectives. If this is not possible, then it would be also the supervisor responsibility to be aware of the DB difficulty and take the appropriate measures fast enough. For this, real time reporting plays a very important role, if it is not possible to check objectively a campaign and it´s process, how are supervisors or campaign responsible going to realize the problem? Real time reporting, monitoring and having the right KPI measuring the campaigns can save lots of idle unproductive times to agents, hence improving campaign results. You can have the best dialer in the market but if you are not controlling it you will probably be losing opportunities.

Training. A good trained agent will be more successful! He will better know how to respond, how to introduce a product and how to close the loop on the sales process. The problem is that the agent needs to be trained in both, the business and service he is going to perform and the tool or software he is going to use. Any flaw in any of those two might lead to a loose in sales or an angry customer. Business training is often performed by a specialized team with broad knowledge on the service and solutions, and the agent is monitored and helped during the training process but software or tool training is often done by the supervisor, this is why an easy to use tool facilitates learning, reduces human mistake and speeds the time to market of campaigns.

Do you agree? In your experience, are there other factors that might contribute to the agent´s motivation? How can supervisors motivate the agents?