How to Engage Your Employees in a Call Center

What’s the difference between a manager and a leader? Knowing how to engage employees well. This is the trick to create a positive and productive work environment in a call center. To improve the performance and success of your call center, follow this simple guide on how to engage employees.

What Is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is about aligning your employees’ goals with the goals of the company. It’s a workplace approach that ensures commitment, a healthy work environment, and wellbeing. It’s also the greatest task for every manager and supervisor.

Employee engagement happens in a lot of different ways. You can have infinite ways to approach your employees. But, employee engagement is only successful when your staff is happy. Their happiness and fulfillment at work is the only way the call center as a whole can succeed.

Why Employee Engagement Is Crucial in a Call Center

70% of Americans are miserable at their job. Burnout, lack of motivation, and boredom at work aren’t just bad for employees. It’s also bad for business. Engaged employees perform better, achieve their goals faster, and do it all with a positive attitude.

Employee engagement is especially important for call centers. Customer service is always an emotion-filled occupation. The patience and kindness employees need to show is crucial to the success of the call center. 

And they can’t do that if they’re miserable.

So, it’s your job as a call center manager to help make them as engaged and as happy as possible. If you know how to engage your employees better, your call center is bound for success.

6 Ways to Engage Your Call Center Employees

There’s no cookie-cutter method for engaging your employees. Every workplace and call center culture is different. But, these steps apply to all workplaces. No matter if you’re running a shoe shop, a car factory, or a call center, these are the steps your need to start your efforts in employee engagement.

1. Get to Know Your Employees First

You can’t engage the employees you don’t know. Sit down with them. Get to know them. Ask them about their personal lives, goals, ambitions. If you know what their goals are, you can help them align it with the goals and values of the call center.

2. Show Them What the Company Works Towards

Do your call center employees see the big picture? They may feel like their work alone isn’t moving the needle. This leads to frustration, lack of motivation, and employee burnout. 

Make it clear for your employees what the overall goal of your department and company is. They’ll feel a lot more motivated knowing that their work helps make a difference.

One of the easiest ways to engage your employees in this step is to promote teamwork. While it’s hard to see their personal contributions to a large call center, they can immediately see their value in a smaller team.

3. Provide Them With Tools For Success

Firstly, you need to make sure your employees know what they’re doing. Training new employees well is crucial to their success at the company. This is especially important in a call center, where a knowledgeable agent performs better in their average handle time.

But, this isn’t the only way you can engage your employees with the promise of success. 

Imagine the frustration your employees feel if they have to work day-to-day with outdated tools and processes. You can unlock their potential by updating their workflows and giving them the newest tools.

In the best call centers, we give our employees the most modern tools and technology. This is how they can truly be their most productive selves. Whether it’s a more user-friendly software or a better headset, we always invest in their happiness at work.

4. Give Them an Opportunity to Grow

Every employee wants the opportunity to grow. Nobody wants to be stuck at the same job for the same pay for years. So, one of the best ways to engage your employees is to give them an achievable opportunity to succeed in the company.

The promise of a promotion or a raise can go a long way. But, you always need to make sure that you follow through. Never promise an employee something you can’t deliver on.

One of the easiest ways to help your employee grow is to provide additional education and training options for them. 

The more skill and knowledge they have, the more they’ll have to offer to the company as well. But, their achievements of learning and growing can also engage them on a personal level.

5. Make Them Feel Valued

Give your employees a reward when a reward is due. Make them feel like their contributions really count. Whether it’s a company-wide recognition or a private pat on the back, your employees will find joy in being valued. 

And they’ll only know this if you show it. Don’t be afraid to voice your appreciation of their work.

6. Listen to Their Feedback

Invite your employees to come to you with their problems. In fact, try to encourage them to come up with ways to their jobs more efficiently. They’ll know their daily tasks much better than you. If they know how to make their lives better, listen to them. Then, make it happen.

If your employees feel heard, they’ll know that you’re looking out for them. Having their best interest at heart is at the core of employee engagement.  

Is Your Call Center Culture Ready for Employee Engagement?

As much as you want to engage your agents at your call center, you may not succeed if you don’t have the right workplace culture. That initial trust between agents and managers needs to be there.

First, evaluate the call center culture you have. Define it in a few words. How do you treat your agents? How do you work with your reps?

Some call centers put their KPIs first. Others focus more on the attitude and customer service they provide. Once you know what type of call center culture you lead, you can work on adjusting it.

Reward Effort in Your Call Center

One of the best ways to improve your call center’s culture is to reward your reps for their effort. As a manager, you can focus on four different areas with this:

• Hiring: Hiring off personality and not necessarily skill.
• Salary: Increasing salary with bonuses is a great incentive. In our call center, we do this with the help of speech analytics. We see exactly what the interactions are between agent and customer. And we reward our reps for their positive attitude.
• Everyday management: How middle management functions to both control and uplift reps. We control the first 30-60 minutes of every shift. We check in on every rep and make sure they’re feeling good and ready to work. If they aren’t, we have open communication, or may even tell them to take a little morning break before they even get started. We want our reps to feel comfortable being transparent with any issue they might have.
• Environment: When you have reps that enjoy their jobs, you foster a healthy and uplifting workplace. We play games, we have fun, and we try to make the working environment as enjoyable as possible because we know the job can be taxing.

How to Know If You’re Engaging Your Employees Well

If you’re doing employee engagement right, your numbers should tell you. If you’re cruising past your KPIs and you’re hitting every meter of success, your employees are doing their best work. 

But to truly understand how well they feel at your place of work, just ask them. Have a conversation about how engaged they feel. At the end of that conversation, you should know the answer to these crucial employee engagement questions:

• Are your company’s goals clear?
• Do your employees understand these goals?
• Can your employees see the connection between their work and those goals?
• Is the leadership approachable?
• Does the leadership motivate the employees?

If the answer is yes to most of these questions, you’re on the right track. Employee engagement is a complex process. There are a million different ways to do it right. But, every step in the right direction matters.

The Call Center That Knows How to Engage Its Employees

Agents are the backbone of a call center. The more engaged and happy they are, the more productive and successful they’ll be. If you don’t invest in your employees’ well-being, you create an unhealthy work environment, and you spoil your customer service.

At Expivia, we know how to engage our employees. We value our agents and provide them with every opportunity they need to grow. We pride ourselves on their incredible work, and our numbers show this. Their success is our success. 

But, it could be yours too.

If you’re looking to outsource your customer service to a call center that knows how to engage its employees, look no further. To find out how we can help your contact center perform better, contact Expivia USA!