Most managers know that exceptional employee experience is crucial to running a successful business. Studies consistently show that happy and engaged employees drive better outcomes for organizations. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, companies that invest in employee experience achieve up to a 45% increase in profits.
In the contact center, where talent turnover can often be a major issue, delighting your team members is particularly crucial to minimizing unnecessary downtime and disruption. However, while there are many strategies companies can use to delight their employees, there are also numerous issues that can harm the employee experience.
Here’s your guide to the 5 biggest employee experience killers, and what you can do to eliminate them from your contact center.
1. Inconsistent or Limited Feedback
Up to 96% of employees say getting regular feedback is crucial to their work. Feedback isn’t just crucial to ensuring staff members feel recognized and valued. It’s also critical to guiding the performance of your team members, ensuring they know which behaviors to prioritize and perfect, and which issues they need to overcome.
In the contact center, consistent feedback is crucial to ensuring agents know when they’re pushing the business towards its targets, and when they’re failing to hit the mark. If you don’t know how well you’re doing (or where you’re failing to achieve results), it’s easy to mentally check out.
Giving your agents constructive feedback on where they can improve, with insights into the right metrics and statistics, helps them to recognize and address their weaknesses. Additionally, providing positive feedback and recognizing your employees when they excel, makes it more likely they’ll continue to replicate positive actions and behaviors. Make sure you’re giving your team members regular updates on their performance. Don’t just wait for an annual review to share feedback.
Chris Mounce, QA and Coaching Specialist at evaluagent explains:
“Your agents should know exactly where their strengths and weaknesses are. This is why regular, detailed QA feedback is so important. You should also be building on that with frequent 1-2-1s too. Coaching is essential to ensure agents remain on the the right path, so it's vital it doesn't fall by the wayside just because things are busy.”
2. Poor Two-Way Communication
Consistent and transparent communication is crucial in a contact center. Agents need to be aware of not only their own strengths and weaknesses, but the challenges facing the business, and what they can do to address them as effectively as possible.
At the same time, while it’s crucial to ensure your agents are informed, and receive regular feedback, it’s also essential to ensure you’re listening to your team members. Up to 41% of employees have abandoned a role simply because they felt they didn’t have a “voice” in the company.
Creating an environment where team members can communicate honestly with their colleagues, and share their insights with business leaders and supervisors is the key to ensuring consistent engagement. Make sure your team members can share their thoughts, concerns, critiques, and requests with your organization. Additionally, try to minimize the anxiety staff feel when sharing feedback, by allowing them to offer their insights anonymously.
3. Lack of Incentive or Rewards
As mentioned above, employees need to know when they’re doing a good job. Employees who receive positive recognition from their managers, supervisors, and even colleagues, are 69% more likely to consistently perform well in any workplace.
Motivating your staff with the right incentives and rewards can be particularly crucial in the contact center, where team members are dealing with high levels of stress, and repetitive work. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways businesses can encourage intrinsic motivation.
