Month: March 2021

By Mark Walton, CEO, Sensée

 

With all the talk about the future of the workplace it’s easy to forget why we’re here in the first place. “It’s about the customer, always” and at no time has that expression been more apt than in today’s turbulent economic times. Forget to put the customer at the heart of what you do and there’ll be a thousand and one competitors keen to take their business away from you.

So what can we do to make sure customers get the best possible service each and every time they make contact? For starters, we can look after our people better as there’s plenty of evidence to show that there is a direct and strong correlation between employee and customer satisfaction.

A 2017 Aberdeen Research report, for example, concluded “businesses that understand the importance of employee engagement and manage it through a formal program to align to their customer experience goals, achieve far superior results” while a 2013 Demand Metric Employee Engagement Survey found that organisations with more than 50% employee engagement retained more than 80% of their customers.  As Richard Branson once famously said “take care of your employees and they will take care of your customers”.

Many of the common techniques used to improve employee engagement in contact centres are well known and well used. They are still worth repeating though. Leading consultant Carolyn Blunt offers 8 tips for success. Namely to ensure that:

1. Your teams are properly trained, supported and coached
2. Your teams are properly and competitively rewarded
3. Your working environment is clean and pleasant
4. Coaches and team leaders are motivated, of high quality, and take ownership of driving forward the strategic performance of your centre
5. Your centre promotes from within, growing talent from frontline agents into people managers
6. Planning/resourcing is professionally run in a way that is as fair as possible to everyone
7. New recruits understand what is expected of them and your organisation recruits primarily for attitude, aptitude and energy in the first instance
8. Managers talk to people both as individuals and as teams. Giving someone the impression that their efforts are ignored will impact motivation, retention, and absence.

While not exhaustive, this list is a great starting point. However, I’d add an extra tip – in many respects one that has emerged because of our experiences during lockdown – and that is to recognise employees’ emotional requirements, and in particular their desire to have more control over their working days.

For most contact centre people, lockdown has meant transitioning from the office to work-from-home. And while this new method of working hasn’t suited everybody, for others it’s been a revelation. No travel to work, no travel costs, spending more time with the family, more time to indulge in sports and hobbies, etc. For many people, moving them back to the office in 2021 will be forcing them back to the office. To a world of sitting in traffic jams on motorways, endless office meetings, and sometimes stressful colleague relationships. And it won’t necessarily be for reasons of productivity. Many people have proven to be just as – if not more – productive working from home.

Stats from the 2020 HomeAgent survey conducted pre lockdown and covering over 200 UK homeworkers paints a particularly interesting picture about employee engagement. 65% of long term UK homeworkers say that they are ‘proud to tell people where they work’, 88% say ‘I want to perform well for the sake of my team’ and only 20% say ‘I miss the emotional support of my co-workers’. 74% say that they enjoy a better work life balance as a result of homeworking.

I’m not advocating work-from-home as the answer to all employee engagement and motivation issues, that would be wrong. What I’m saying is that work-from-home can be a key part of the long term mix and especially for those that are suited to homeworking, have a suitable home office working space, and can prove that they are efficient working from home.

The rest is down to their employers to make sure that homeworking is effective. In some respects running a homeworking contact centre is simpler than running a bricks and mortar operation. In other respects it is much harder, calling for a virtual mindset and suitable systems and processes across everything from recruitment & onboarding to training, scheduling, communications, management, infosecurity….. and of course procedures and systems that look out for the health and well being of all employees working remotely.

In this piece, journalist Ana Steele discusses ways that organisations can help their people get more from homeworking.

The rise of remote work is perhaps one of the most welcome changes brought about by the pandemic. About two-thirds of UK adults are now working from home, and it is expected that this setup will last for quite some time. But while it is indeed the safer and more convenient option for companies, it isn’t always the easiest for workers to stay productive. With that, here are a few ways you can help your remote worker colleagues be more productive:



Equip them with the right tools

If your company doesn’t have the online tools to stay connected and work efficiently yet, now is the time to provide them with it. Sensée’s LiveDesk platform, for instance, provides contact centre homeworkers with a full suite of communication and collaboration tools, enabling them to communicate with colleagues, and receive online support from managers and experts, just as they would in a bricks and mortar centre. With LiveDesk, managers can create bulletins and alerts to immediately keep everyone up to speed with important events. Polls can also be made for quick feedback regarding anything — from team satisfaction to checking if important information has been read. For project management, Asana can handle large projects and complex teams. It even utilises Gantt timelines and has a project dashboard that shows tasks by status, priority, and assignee.

Encourage them to work ergonomically

Working at home should give your employees more control of their work environments – and you can point them in the right direction by suggesting they make their work spaces more ergonomic. An ergonomic workspace should be comfortable enough for them to work in but not too relaxing that they might slack off like they would on their couch. Aside from the usual ergonomic chairs and tables, you can also encourage them to use ergonomic accessories — such as the right keyboard and angled mouse to ease the tension from their wrists due to typing all day. It may seem like a small change, but it can help prevent more serious problems like carpal tunnel syndrome, which will most definitely discourage them from being productive.

Set proper work hours

A key reason many people choose to work from home is to have a better life-work balance by fitting in work around their other daily priorities. If they don’t plan for homeworking effectively though, the lines between work and personal life can get blurred, sometimes leading to employee burnout. Effective planning tools are therefore essential. Homeworkers must set proper work hours to maximize their days and fully clock out afterwards. Sensée’s TeamTonic helps make this possible by enabling contact centre homeworkers to self-select their workday hours (within parameters set by the centre) to achieve their desired life-work balance – while ensuring organisations can precisely meet customer demand without wasting resource.

Have a virtual co-working space

With entire days spent alone and in front of the computer screen, the feeling of isolation can definitely creep in for many remote professionals. Creating virtual co-working spaces however can lessen this feeling of loneliness. In addition to being a platform for supporting, training and providing guidance for homeworkers, Sensée’s LiveDesk is also a collaborative workspace with private chat areas where homeworkers can socialise during breaks. With colleagues visible online at all times, homeworkers know that they’re not alone. Employees may not get the experience of physically working together, but they are able to get a sense of community in these spaces. Other ways to improve the sense of community is to organise virtual games nights or give virtual shout-outs, so that all employees feel appreciated.

Coping with distractions is hard enough, but continually working when you’re away from your peers is sometimes harder. However, these tips can help encourage your employees to stay productive.

Just because homeworking means there is no commute to work, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to prepare properly for the working day.

In this 2 min video, we look at how a Sensée homeworker might typically prepare for the day ahead.

Just click on the image below.