Customer service is an important part of any business. A large amount of money goes into acquiring the right talent and ensuring they are developed and capable of meeting 
business targets and maintaining service levels. It’s simple, without the right employees manning the front line of customer service it’s extremely difficult for a business to thrive and succeed.
Disengaged employees
As soon as engagement starts to decline, companies become more vulnerable resulting in a measurable drop in productivity, poorer customer service and greater rates of absenteeism and turnover[1].
A recent 142-country study by Gallup indicated that 63% of employees worldwide are “not engaged” indicating that they lack motivation and are less likely to invest effort in achieving organisational goals or outcomes. A write up on the report suggests that increasing workplace engagement is vital to achieving sustainable growth for companies and putting the economy back on track. Some of the issues caused by disengaged employees include:
- Employees unwilling to put in extra effort
- Increased employee absence
- Increased staff turnover
- Decreasing turnover and profit margins
How do you identify disengaged employees?
Our research suggests the following tell-tale signs and traits indicate a ‘disengaged employee’:
- Complains – nothing is ever good enough
- Lacks interest and doesn’t care to get involved in new projects
- Makes excuses without ever taking responsibility for his/her actions
- Shows no initiative and waits to be told what to do
- Distracted – distractions are needed in a healthy workplace, but disengaged employees will be distracted extremely easily and will find it hard to refocus
- No interest in growing professionally – they don’t invest in themselves and have no desire to grow within the role or the company
According to the corporate leadership council employees who are most committed perform 20% better and are 87% less likely to leave the organisation. So how can we understand and resolve employee disengagement in the customer service arena to drive a happier and more profitable workforce?
5 ways to help tackle employee disengagement
1. Constant feedback and training
Commit fully to employee training. Keep them interested in the job through learning and knowledge acquisition. Use tools like call quality monitoring to review past customer call recordings and identify areas that require improvement as well as encouraging them to share best practice with others. Once you have identified these areas, provide both positive and negative feedback to help the employee improve in a constructive manner. Offer further training where possible and ensure they leave each meeting being fully on board with their development plan in order to meet their professional expectations as well as improve the company’s performance. If you don’t take an interest in the performance of your staff – how can you expect them to?
2. Empower and trust your people
Empower your customer service team to take responsibility and ownership for managing their own schedules and planning in their own working hours and holidays. Not only will it help them feel more in control of their work but will provide a healthy balance between their professional and private life. Moreover, empowering your staff will also help with team building and internal communications as they will need to communicate and work with each other to ensure each shift has the right number of people in place with the right skills mix to meet service level requirements. Technology such as workforce management can assist with this and automate some of these processes whilst also reducing some of the administrative headaches in managing this on a mass scale.
3. Rewards and appreciation
Provide incentives and praise those who do well. Really show your employees the organisation respects and values them. Inspire them to keep doing the things that support positive customer service. In order to find the right incentives to motivate staff consider asking them directly to suggest rewards they are likely to strive for. After all, different things motivate different people.
4. Make a game of it
Increasingly gamification is being used to help drive employee engagement. Using game mechanics, it is a powerful way of leveraging your employee’s desires for socialising, learning, status, self-expression and more. Gamification encourages employees to compete for achievement badges, points, trophies and so on by achieving a number of set goals or targets your organisation may set. Once acquired these trophies or badges are displayed on an employees profile page for all in the business to see and should act as encouragement for those struggling in a certain area to actively seek help from the current score board leaders in this skill set or goal.
5. Measure what really matters
Focusing too strongly on set productivity and achievement metrics, such as average handle time (AHT) can lead to a pressurised environment and push staff to miss more important metrics, like customer satisfaction. Understand what is important for the organisation and focus employees on achieving those metrics instead of more generalised industry ones. By providing a more balanced set of metrics by which to measure performance that doesn’t solely focus on productivity and efficiency, you are potentially reducing stress levels for emplpoyees and some of the triggers which might lead to disengagement.
Your business operates thanks to your workforce. Ensuring levels of engagement are kept high will not only reduce staff turnover but will also help boost productivity and revenue.
Source:
[1] http://www.towerswatson.com/assets/pdf/2012-Towers-Watson-Global-Workforce-Study.pdf