Building a Culture That Drives Customer Success: Leadership & Culture Transformation for High-Performing Contact Centers
In order to provide the best customer service possible, contact centers must be running at peak efficiency and a high-performance culture helps make this possible. Creating this culture in a contact center involves forming an environment where employees are content, fulfilled, and motivated to meet their goals. By creating a workforce with these ideas in mind, agents can find success and organizations can experience increased customer engagement, leading to higher revenue. Building this culture is an internal initiative, and there are many strategies businesses and leaders can implement in order to create this standard. Finding success when creating a high-performance culture depends on solid leadership, engagement, and inclusivity in the workplace. Prioritizing these initiatives can help organizations better serve customers and reach new levels of growth.
The Role of Leadership
The creation of a high-performance company culture is dependent on a solid foundation. Engaged and knowledgeable leaders are critical to a contact center’s success as they play a pivotal role in providing agent support. There are several characteristics that are key to creating valuable leaders and helping foster a culture of success. Leaders should start by forming a deep understanding of business operations, as this enables them to troubleshoot problems more quickly and become a reliable resource for agents. Managers should be able to address issues efficiently while practicing top-level communication skills in order to motivate their teams. Practicing empathy and understanding also helps create a comfortable and open environment for employees.
Looking to give your leadership skills a boost? While there are many training programs that are helpful when it comes to finding workplace leadership tips and training, real-world experience is paramount. Leaders should practice listening, self-reflection, and implement the feedback techniques that work for them in order to develop skills quickly. Seeking out a mentor can be a great additional resource.
In order to keep employees happy and create a high-performance culture, there are a few workplace leadership tips and strategies managers should keep top of mind:
Create a unified operating plan: Having a standard operating procedure (SOP) can help employees better understand expectations, goals, and everyday work operations. This can reduce confusion and lead to increased success. Understanding best practices when it comes to customer service is also of the utmost importance.
Prioritize quality assurance: Practicing proper quality assurance techniques helps create a company culture of growth. Monitoring calls and scheduling check-ins can help ensure that issues are addressed early and that plans can be made for underperforming employees to improve.
Prevent agent burnout: Turnover is often high in contact center roles and reducing burnout is a top priority. This can be done by anticipating peak hours and having enough agents scheduled for support. Be sure to listen to any employee concerns and adjust accordingly.
Employee Engagement
When creating a high-performance company culture, it’s critical to account for employee engagement and make improvements as needed. Providing agents with coaches or mentors can create a higher level of engagement, setting them up for success and boosting their performance. Additionally, ensuring that agents feel appreciated and acknowledged creates a more positive workplace and fosters better customer care. Performance incentives can help facilitate this process and can be in the form of bonuses, gifts, extra vacation days, or whatever works best for your team.
Fostering Inclusivity
Agents are the heart and soul of contact centers and it is crucial that they feel comfortable in the workplace. Creating a culture of inclusivity is a good place to start and can make employees from all backgrounds feel like they have a valued place within the organization. Companies can achieve this through open lines of communication, diversity training, and support groups. Additionally, implementing policies that promote diversity can help foster a culture of acceptance within the organization.
Creating a High-Performance Culture
In order to create a high-performance culture in a contact center, efficiency is key. The success of a contact center depends on speed, but it also depends on accuracy. Proper training, support, and tools all contribute to creating more successful employees. Opportunities for career development and progression push agents toward continuous growth and recurring team meetings allow everyone to align.
The proper technology can also have a big impact when it comes to contact center performance. There are several tools which can be utilized:
Scheduling tools: It’s important to be efficient when creating schedules in order to plan for peak call times and give your agents the support they need. Tools like Talkdesk, Deputy, and Shiftboard can help organize this process.
Interaction analytics: If you’re looking to uncover insights from call center conversations, using natural language processing and other related techniques can be a helpful way to discover customer pain points.
Call center software: Client portals, help center software, e-commerce platforms, and IVR systems can all be useful tools for managing a call center. Additionally, exploring generative AI can be an innovative option.
It’s important to remember that workplace culture and motivation both affect the service agents give their customers. When an inclusive environment is created, employee morale is improved, making them more likely to thrive in their roles. In fact, research shows that companies with a positive culture have up to 72% higher employee engagement and employees who are happy within their workplace can be up to 21% more efficient. These numbers play a big role in increasing customer engagement, satisfaction metrics, and revenue.
Create a Plan for Success
The success of a contact center depends on the productivity of its employees. By making agents feel supported, providing proper leadership, and creating an inclusive company culture, organizations can achieve high performance and better customer engagement. Implementing these strategies today can set your team up for success in the future. Step into your leadership role and help pave the way. Register for our upcoming Customer Contact Week event in Nashville to get more insights and a chance to network with industry leaders.
