4 min
The wellbeing of the workforce is essential to maintaining an effective corporate program. Working with an employee engagement management solution can help at all levels of a company. In this sense, promoting personal and organizational growth play a crucial role in the success of an organization.
What Are The Challenges Of Executives?
Although stress is nothing new, today’s agents are much more explicit in raising their concerns about it. Contact center managers are now tasked with balancing the needs of the business with rising levels of stress among the team. While managing employee mental health is an essential part of improving customer experience (CX), it can be difficult to implement a program around it.
Some concerns for call center administrators, both on-premises and cloud-based, include:
- Recruitment and retention.
- Keep staff happy.
- Attract new talent with the right skills.
- Reduce pressure to motivate workers.
- Hybrid and remote workers.
- Include performance coaching to strengthen agent skills.
- Maintain a high level of customer satisfaction.
Thus, recruiting and retaining high-value agents is essential to improve CX. This is because the best-trained employees are able to maintain adequate performance metrics. Preventing agent attrition is also crucial to avoiding the costly fees of having to hire and train new talent due to high turnover. For this reason, implementing a solid wellness strategy is key.
7 Essential Elements of an Effective Wellness Strategy
So what can supervisors do to build a happy and productive team? Here are some ideas:
1) Make Agents Feel Valued
When agents feel valued, their work is infinitely more meaningful and less stressful. According to the “Agent Wellbeing and the Great Resignation” survey, there are several reasons why employees are leaving call center jobs, such as:
- Low salary: 18%.
- Limited growth opportunities: 26%.
- Generally dissatisfied with the job: 36%.
One way to help is to invest in mental health initiatives and add personalized training opportunities. Performance coaching highlights agents’ individual strengths, finds areas for improvement, and creates clear career paths so they can see a future within a company. All of these programs can help call center agents feel more respected and valued for their time and hard work.
2) Boost Flexibility
Another top concern the survey revealed was that 34% of agents wanted more flexibility in their work environments. This is necessary to help them adapt to exceptional situations. A great solution to this problem is to add agent-driven scheduling processes. Self-scheduling allows agents to take control of their day-to-day with real-time flexibility that can adapt to the unexpected.
This feature also removes the burden of managing schedule changes, shift changes, overtime, and time off requests by introducing the latest mobile agent self-service chatbots. It is about putting at your disposal a time management tool.
3) Invest in Agent Empowerment Technologies
The research also showed that 40% of agents accept Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a means to free themselves from repetitive tasks. AI bots and other machine learning (ML) tools create an opportunity for agents to focus on more satisfying, higher-value services that only experienced employees can deliver.
The technology also helps elevate contact centers to better support the needs of hybrid and remote teams. Personalized dashboards are an added bonus for agents working remotely because it allows them to track their own performance, as well as stay focused and motivated throughout their shifts.
4) Strengthen the Emotional Connection
Checking in with agents to gauge your stress levels is always a good idea. While it may seem like a no-brainer, it can be easy to forget, especially with all the other pressing needs call centers have. One way to help is to encourage supervisors to build regular one-on-one sessions into their schedules to increase agents’ sense of belonging to the team and the organization.
Another useful solution is to maximize analytics to identify agents who may be struggling and need help. The latest Voice of Employee (VoE) analytics capture and analyze how frontline staff is feeling and desktop analytics uncover IT systems that are slowing them down.
5) Facilitate the Work of Agents
As agents handle more complex customer requests, new technology is essential. Do employees know what technology is available to them to make their lives easier and do they know how to use it? To do this, it is worth examining call center systems, trying to offer agents a consolidated view of customer information on a single screen, incorporating VoC (Voice of the Customer) analytics to support more meaningful and empathic interactions.
6) Implement Performance Coaching
This means making personal development a priority in a contact center. By taking a personalized approach and offering plenty of up skilling opportunities, you help build agents’ confidence and improve their sense of wellbeing.
Performance coaching helps to continually train employees, identify skill gaps, pinpoint areas where they are struggling, and encourage their success. By making this an intrinsic part of the corporate and staff engagement program, it will be possible to set the stage for professional growth and personal development throughout the company.
7) Be a Connected Company
An organization, by developing its technology, processes and overall thinking, will help staff excel in their roles. Thus, creating a connected culture to collectively impact positive customer outcomes helps create opportunities for organizational growth.
Subscribe
Ask for a demo