There are a number of ways you can improve your employees’ experience in the short term. Competitions, prizes and treats are a quick way to increase happiness and productivity – but what about in the long run? Stefan Captijn, Solution Marketing Director Business Applications at Genesys discusses some of the best ways to improve the working environment for your employees in the long term.
Use your IVR more intelligently
Using IVR is a great way to speed up calls but it is also an excellent way to collect information about customers. This way you make sure you connect customers with the most relevant agent with the right skillsets straight away, and who knows what the customer is calling about so they won’t have to waste their time repeating the information all over again. You can also pre-populate your agent-desktop with additional customer information automatically. The result? Happier customers and more productive agents.
Allow frequent, short breaks
No one wants to be working long hours non-stop, solving difficult problems with equally difficult customers or just answering the same question over and over again. Agents get tired and become de-motivated, not to mention their potentially rising stress levels. Providing agents with opportunities to take small breaks will allow them to re-energise and can really improve agent productivity.
Provide variety to your agents
Agents can get bored or demotivated quickly from performing the same activity all the time. You can keep agents happy and engaged by offering multiple types of interactions, without sacrificing service level on either one of your channels. An integrated multi-channel workforce management solution that works together with your interaction routing engine can greatly automate the forecasting and planning process. It can manage what activity for your agents work on automatically based on the multi-media schedule.
It comes as no shock that a higher level of employee satisfaction correlates to a higher quality of customer service, and this is even more important in the contact centre where employees will be speaking to customers all the time. A happy employee is your company’s biggest brand advocate, so it’s important that you do all you can to create a positive working experience for them.
Stefan Captijn
Stefan Captijn serves as Strategic Business Director WFO for the EMEA region of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Stefan has over 15 years of experience in the customer service industry and held various positions ranging from Information Technology, Sales, Product Marketing and Business Consulting Lead. In his current role, Stefan oversees the go to market strategy and it’s execution for the Genesys WFO product suite.