Contact Centers: How to Boost Contact Center Operations
Want tips on improving your contact center’s employee application and recognition programs? At the National Conference on Operations and Fulfillment, held in Grapevine, Texas, last week, several contact center experts offered their advice during the session”60 Ideas in 60 Minutes: Contact Center/Customer Service.” Here are three of their tips:
¥ Be sure you have a motivational fit: “When interviewing contact center applicants, tell them what the job actually will be like,” said Penny Reynolds, founding partner of The Call Center School, a Nashville, Tenn.-based company that offers contact center education. “Make sure they understand they won’t be getting a corner office, they’ll be tied to their workstations for a set amount of time each day, and you’ll be monitoring their actions every second of the day. That is, be sure you tell them during the application process about the work conditions.”
¥ Talk to or listen to applicants on the phone. Liz Kislik, president of Liz Kislik Associates, a Rockville Centre, N.Y.-based management consultancy, said she always is surprised at how many catalogers put the words “no calls please” in their ads for contact center reps. “If you can’t take the volume of calls, send the calls to a voice mail system in which you request that the applicant leave messages in a certain way. Did they follow the directions you gave them? That’s a good sign of their competence for the job,” Kislik noted. “Or take the calls, and determine how they sounded on the phone.”
¥ Give recognition and attention: Kathy Gennette, customer contact center director at Norm Thompson Outfitters, an Oregon-based multititle cataloger, gives high-performance contact center reps recognition such as private lunches with her. “During these lunches, I also get great ideas for work processes we can improve,” Gennette said,”and by winning the lunches, the reps get recognition among their peers.” Gennette and the other Norm Thompson managers also send reps holiday cards and notes of congratulations when they do good work. “Reps think, ‘You noticed!’”
