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Welcome to our first ever Valentine’s Day addition of Recorded for Quality Assurance! Today Rob Connelly and Visitio welcome Suzi Earhart of McorpCX. She’s all about solving problems, giving love, life-long learning and helping others reach their full potential, so she’s here to help us show agents some love today!
Contact centers sometimes take a lot of heat for issues with the functioning of their call centers that end up actually being business issues disguised as call center issues.
[ 4:22 – 5:03 ] Contact center agents are creative, determined people who solve complex problems under stress.
So, how can we empower them and drive better business outcomes?
Three key areas:
- Helping to provide agents a doable job
- Providing rewarding re-enforcements
- Having a mentoring mindset
[ 8:58 – 9:41 ] Sometimes we need to re-configure our incoming calls so that agents can clear out their queues and not feel constantly overwhelmed. Agents need their 30 second breaks in-between calls to not be consumed with after-call work.
[ 12:47 – 14:26 ] The predictable pizza party reward isn’t actually helping agents grow in their careers. What makes a difference in whether the agents feel valued and seen? It’s the leaders’ awareness of the agents’ “why.”
[ 15:13 – 16:28 ] “The people who lead the best are the people who listen the most.” On this show our most recurring advice to leaders is to sit down with your agents, listen to them and take calls with them.
Team leads and supervisors have a lot of power and potential in their roles because they can be the closest to the agents.
[ 18:06 – 18:57 ] You can say all day long that you value mental health and strive to have a positive work environment, but we are talking about how to actually show your agents that you care and mean it.
We’d love to talk to guests from call centers who are doing this well. Please reach out to us!
Resources:
- McorpCX is offering a course to help you understand customer experience. Want to improve your skill sets? Use this promo code to save. $129 down to $85!
- Great podcast: Doing CX Right with Stacy Sherman
- CX Accelerator Community
- Hidden Brain Podcast
- The book 1001 Ways to Reward Employees
- Contact Center Management on Fast Forward by Brad Cleveland
To listen to a recording of this and other episodes, visit vistio.io/podcasts. And to join our show live each week, go to vistio.io/cxlive.