Organisations have realised the amazing benefits of providing customer-centric cultures that create moments of ‘wow’ for every step of the customer journey. But along the way, have we forgotten about the employee experience?
A survey by Peldon Rose earlier this year revealed that half of employees say that their working environment has a negative effect on their mental health and wellbeing, with two-thirds saying that they only ‘sometimes, rarely or never’ feel valued at work.
Today’s contact centres need to realise that customer and employee values and expectations are interchangeable, and we need to modernise a very traditional environment to create a healthy and interactive atmosphere. The contact centre needs to become a dream job rather than a stepping stone to one.
We’ve outlined three simple steps you can take to create an engaged workplace for today’s contact centre:
1. Find the gamechangers
In the social media landscape influencers are those select individuals that help shape an area -- be it health, fashion, or pop-culture -- into inspiration for viewers. Similar people exist at your centre, but you need to find them and help their influence flourish.
It’s important to note that we are not necessarily defining a workplace influencer by tenure, hierarchy, or job title but instead someone who is the “go-to” when you are in need. An organisational network analysis across departments can be a good start to help identifying your influencers and kickstarting a core group to engage.
Once you pull together this group, begin on-going engagement programmes to help build trust and foster strong, functional relationships within the team. As the team becomes more comfortable regularly engage with them to pull in collective and open feedback on how to improve your workplace environment.
2. Gather expert employee know-how
Different associates grow at different rates. Help encourage advanced employees to spread their experience across the organisation -- benefiting both them and their coworkers. Incentivise them to share knowledge, best practices, and operational suggestions that drive automation and business improvements.
Then use an internal knowledgebase to help share and update these tips in real-time for associates to readily use. Online social collaboration communities can be a fantastic space for employees to comment freely and discuss their concerns with coworkers.
Influencers from step one will be key contributors to the network, helping spread their teachings from what may have otherwise been a smaller network.
3. Gamify the employee experience
Smartphones play a positive role in our lives with the ability to access games and social content to create fun, convenience, and insight and caring at our fingertips. Substitute fun with gamification -- video game like employee platforms -- and you get amazingly engaged employees. Gamification practices help spur simultaneous learning and progression for coworkers in a single collaborative space.
The key is to encourage positive online behaviour by providing points or creating statuses that can be cashed in or used for tangible, physical items or activities such as “dress down days” or time off. The criteria for these points can be based around activities such as level rankings, reaching a number of followers, and answering questions.
Overall, it’s about creating an environment that fosters individual and group growth to achieve awards, knowledge, growth, and measurable progress through relevant technology.
Engage the contact centre of the future
Tomorrow’s workplace will be about unlocking the value and recognition employees expect out of their organisations. But in order to do so, leaders need to encourage their top talent to work with technology to create a collaborative environment that is always adapting to changing needs. It is about creating an ideal centre that is focused on wellbeing first, which in turn leads to great customer experience.
Discover more opinion on ‘the contact centre of the future’ by listening to our recent podcast: https://www.ttec.com/emea/cxpod/contact-centre-future.
