Setting Up a Call Center Employee Suggestion Program

As many of you may know, we have started a texting community to get more specific information out to all our listeners and readers. (If you’d like to join, text “Hello!” to 814-247-0366 and you will be able to have direct access to us for any call center ops question. We will also be sending out exclusive call center ops content to all community members. We will NEVER attempt to sell you anything nor will we sell your data.)

As I have been receiving texts, I have been getting questions that are really specific to your individual call centers. One question intrigued me, a texter named Matt asked me my thoughts on setting up a call center employee suggestion program. This is definitely an actionable item you can use to improve your center. Since sending the majority of our reps to work at home, our suggestion program doesn’t reach too much farther than an IM to a higher up. However, I’ll talk about how we did it when every employee was in-house.

You could always start with the classic “box with a hole in the top”- literal suggestion box. The defining feature of setting up a suggestion program is that you will receive realistic suggestions and unattainable suggestions. “We need more money, we need picnics, we need a vending machine in the office,” those sorts of suggestions are inevitable, but to narrow it down to the right ideas you need to define your culture. You need to tell your employees that any suggestion that you give is to enhance the culture of the organization. Expivia’s culture is built around attitude and effort. Therefore, any suggestion that we use or an employee gives, has to add or complement those two things. Instead of the fishbowl or the box with a hole, at Expivia we set up a room with a dry erase board in it, and employees can go in and write on the board their suggestions. Written on the board is a ven diagram, one bubble labeled attitude, and one labeled effort, and they can write their suggestion in one or both bubbles. Once the diagram is filled out, the executive team will vote on the suggestions that seem the most attainable and beneficial to both the organization and the employees themselves.

The employees are the ones doing that front-line work, and they know better than anyone what can enhance their job, make their day more fun, and ultimately make the entire machine more efficient and enjoyable to work in. The implementation of their suggestions really empowers the employees too. Everyone can have a say in how our company is run.

Thank you again to Matt for the engaging topic, and we hope more of you join our texting community!