How to Improve CX? Ensure your Call Center Agents are Happy!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve surely been bombarded by reports of how Customer Experience (CX) has become all-important.
Content marketing managers have gone wild with this trend. They’ve been pushing out articles emphasizing the importance of customer experience and how it benefits your business.
Now, I could do the same and throw statistics at you. Like, 85% of customers are willing to pay more for a good customer experience. Or 90% of customers will tell others about their poor experience with your business.
But that isn’t helping you, is it? I'm sure you already know how important it is to make your customers happy. With that, I suppose you’re looking for ways you can improve your CX. So let me help you with that.
How? By showing you ways to celebrate call center agents to improve your CX.
Let’s begin then, shall we?
Why is it Important to Keep your Call Center Agents Happy?
Simply put, your call center agents are the ones who directly interact with the customers. So unless they’re happy, they’re not going to make an effort to make your customers happy.
Happy Agents = Happy Customers
In general, having happy employees is tremendously beneficial for your business. There are too many statistics that back up this statement.
For instance, businesses with happy employees generate 20% more revenue compared to their competition. They’re also 10 times less likely to fall sick resulting in fewer days off.
So happy call center agents make more profits for your business. But how does the happiness level of agents impact the customer experience?
To understand that I will break down key functional areas which experience improved performance when a call center agent is happy.
How do Happy Call Center Agents Improve CX?
I’ve studied a lot of Economics and am skeptical about the whole trickle-down effect of wealth generation. However, if there's one thing that trickles for sure, it's happiness.
1. Happy Agents are More Patient with Customers
Patience is one of the most valuable virtues for customer service operations. When a customer contacts the business the most common possibilities are:
- They have difficulty using the product.
- The product is working as intended.
- They’re not happy with the product.
In either case, the customer is unhappy and tricky to manage due to their bad experience with the product. Such situations require a call center agent to be patient, listen to the customer and understand the issue.
A happy call center agent is less likely to get irritated when handling a demanding customer. They will not only handle the customer with patience but ensure the problem is resolved in the best manner.
2. They are Empathetic Toward the Customers
Empathy is another valuable virtue to have for customer service operations. A cold approach to problem-solving can derail your operations. Humans want to be treated like humans, with warmth and empathy.
Happier individuals are more empathetic towards others in general. Thus, having happier call center agents means they will treat the customers with more empathy and compassion.
The sense of being heard, understood, and valued is very important for any customer relationship. We know how beneficial happy and loyal customers are for any business. Having happy agents can help you build long-term positive customer relationships.
3. They are Better Problem Solvers
Happy people are more dedicated and focused on their work. Combined with an objective approach, they turn out to be very effective problem solvers.
Problem-solving starts with learning about the issue and understanding the entire situation. We’ve already covered how happier people are patient listeners and empathetic.
This allows them to understand the situation problem, comfort the customers and come up with a good solution as quickly as possible.
As a result, your first call resolution rate jumps and you have customers who’re enjoying the customer service experience.
4. They Exhibit Greater Eagerness to Help
The best call center agent to have is the one who is the most eager to help out a customer. Turns out, happy individuals are more eager to help out other individuals.
So it's a win-win for your business to keep your call center agents happy. Happy Agents will naturally make more efforts to ensure a customer is treated well and their problems are resolved.
Such a proactive approach and good problem-solving deliver a good customer experience to the end consumer. Moreover, making a customer happy only adds to an agent’s happiness and job satisfaction.
You can build a positive feedback loop in this manner that can benefit your business tremendously.
Now we know 4 ways in which happy call center agents improve CX. Let us move on to the main part of this article.
How to Make Your Call Center Agents Happy?
Making your call center agents happy is not dissimilar to making your customers happy. The key ingredients are the same, being recognized, understood and valued.
By celebrating their wins and improvements, you can ensure you’re adding to their happiness and making the workplace a happy environment.
How should you celebrate them? Let me show you!
1. Interact With Them on a Personal Level
A tiny gesture from the senior leadership of any business can go a long way in ensuring agent happiness. Talk to your call center agents, get to know their names, find common interests, make small talk, etc.
Greet them when you walk past their cubicles, ask them for suggestions, give advice, etc. Small interactions like these add a lot of value to their work life.
You’re not only showcasing that you acknowledge them but also building stronger interpersonal bonds within the organization.
Look at this from their perspective. The MD, CTO, CMO, etc. knows them by name, chit-chats with them, and always greets them. That’s so fulfilling for any employee. All of this employee satisfaction and happiness come at no additional cost to your business.
2. Celebrate Their Wins
A 1% increase in customer retention may seem insignificant in a performance report but for a call center agent, it might be the culmination of hours of hard work.
You don’t even have to make the celebration a grand affair. Order some pizza or muffins for the team. Sit down with them and praise the hard work of all agents.
Talk to them, look out for suggestions and ideas, and motivate them to outperform themselves. Such gestures showcase your investment in their performance and improvement.
Positively reaffirming small wins on a personal level adds a lot of positivity to an employee’s life. Thus, they’ll improve, perform better and lead others by example.
3. Recognize their Contribution
You will have some employees who go the extra mile in assisting a customer, ensuring their problems are resolved and they’re happy.
Then some employees put in more hours, assist colleagues and senior leadership, take up additional responsibilities and leadership roles, etc.
Make sure their extra work and contribution to the business are recognized. You can issue certificates of appreciation for them, write favorable performance reviews, etc.
These were the professional ways you can recognize their contribution. You can personalize the ordeal by doing something as small as writing a thank you card.
You’ve seen how effective personalization is for customers. It's no different when it comes to your employees so go the extra mile for those who go out of their way for the business.
4. Let Them Choose Their Rewards
A key to effectively celebrating your call center agents is to celebrate their individuality. No two people are the same in terms of their preferences. The word “reward” means something different for every individual.
Some people are driven by monetary rewards, some by material and some by immaterial rewards.
Now you can have your HRs look into this and come up with the best possible rewards for every call center agent. However, it would be just easy to give them options and let them choose whatever best suits them.
This will ensure every agent is rewarded in the best way possible and it would add any extra workload for your other teams.
5. Gamify Your Operations
You can maximize employee happiness by ensuring they’re having fun and enjoying every aspect of work. This can be done through gamification of your operations.
Depending upon your size of operations, you can either have employees competing against each other or forming groups and competing with other groups.
With gamification, there is a risk of a select employee or group always winning the game. Under such circumstances, the whole ordeal becomes monotonous and negatively impacts performance.
One way to prevent this is to change the challenge regularly and ensure each challenge focuses on a different area of performance.
Thus, every challenge will have different winners and agents will be incentivized to improve in areas they’re weak.
Conclusion
The key to improving Customer Experience is to start celebrating your call center agents and making them happy. Happiness trickles so every happy agent handling a customer means the customer ends up happy too.
It might take some tinkering but if you get this right, your business will do amazing in the long run.
So what else will you do to improve your CX?