How to Keep Your Contact Center Agents Engaged and Efficient

With so many distractions in today’s contact center environment, the already-difficult challenge of maintaining agent engagement and efficiency has grown all the more difficult. But without engaged agents, both your customer satisfaction and your overall business success can suffer.

But the good news is there are strategies to keep your contact center agents motivated, supported and productive, no matter what unique challenges you face. 

Key strategies for keeping agents engaged and efficient

There are several different approaches you can take to prevent your agents from becoming overwhelmed and disengaged:

Motivational strategies

For many agents, disengagement could be directly related to motivational problems stemming from the lack of being dialed into your contact center’s goals. 

Fostering a positive work environment may be the first step towards overcoming these challenges and maximizing your agent’s productivity. Here are several specific ways you can do that:

• Recognize and reward: Implement a robust recognition program to celebrate achievements and encourage high performance. Gamification could be a great way to implement this strategy into your contact center.
• Promote career growth: Offer training and development opportunities to help agents advance their skills and reach their career goals.
• Create a supportive culture: Foster a positive and inclusive work environment where agents feel valued and respected.

Workload management

However, ensuring your agents stay motivated will be ineffective if their workloads are also not appropriately managed – overwhelm can still create a bottleneck in your operations. Combat the effects of agent burnout and inefficiency with solutions like TCN’s Workforce Engagement suite, including Workforce Optimization and Workforce Management. With this suite of tools, manage workloads by scheduling agents based on skills, time of day and peak call volume and utilize data to boost productivity and performance. 

Additionally, utilizing skills-based routing such as TCN’s Automatic Call Distribution can also be a very effective tool to prevent agent burnout while promoting agent engagement and efficiency. By ensuring agents are only receiving calls that they are best qualified to help, you will be boosting their confidence and avoiding time wasted transferring calls. 

Finally, ensuring agents have adequate breaks and access to the support they need to proficiently accomplish their tasks are vital steps in agent workload management.

Empowering technology

Fostering motivation and managing workloads are effective in avoiding agent disengagement, but it will be an uphill battle without the appropriate contact center software to support your endeavors. 

When selecting your contact center software provider, be sure to keep our for solutions like these that will make keeping your agents engaged and efficient a breeze:

• Business Intelligence: Effectively monitor the efficiency of your strategies with real-time, customizable data. 
• Agent Assist: Enhance agent performance by ensuring they have all the tools they need to succeed during customer interactions – all within one simple interface. 
• Room 303: Maintain seamless and easy collaboration between managers and agents with an internal chat application.
• Work from home solutions: Monitor and promote productivity with flexible and scalable solutions made especially to help remote agents remain engaged and efficient.

The right contact center software keeps agents engaged and efficient by reducing mundane tasks and frustrations. Request a demo to discover exactly how TCN can empower your contact center to reach maximum productivity.

Implementing strategies for agent engagement and efficiency

By implementing these strategies, you can create a contact center where agents feel engaged, motivated and empowered to deliver exceptional customer service while maximizing your profitability. 

It is important to tailor these strategies to meet the needs of your specific contact center. Get to know the personalities and needs of your agents to determine if gamification, recognition programs and/or further career development opportunities would be the most effective at 

improving motivation levels.

Determine what the biggest hindrance to employee engagement may be to decide if you should focus on workload management or seeking out and utilizing empowering technology first. 

Overall, it is important to remember that it is possible to promote agent efficiency and engagement – you just need to select the right strategies. Learn more about how TCN can help you keep your contact center agents engaged and efficient.