Call centres have high levels of staff turnover, amongst the highest of any industry sector. As the average cost for replacing staff is estimated by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development as up to £9,000, it is fundamental to the success of any organisation to retain its best employees.
Responding to your employees’ needs not only increases employee engagement and improves employee retention, but also promotes customer satisfaction, which is consistently reported as one of the most important issues for contact centres.
What’s going wrong?
Managers face competing demands to improve customer service and to streamline the efficiency of their call centre’s service levels. This can often make employees feel pressurised and scrutinised and can actually prevent them from fully satisfying the demands of their customers.
Call centre and customer contact staff have traditionally assessed and managed their effectiveness by adopting metrics like ‘time to answer’, ‘longest queue time’ and ‘longest wait to abandon’. Operating call centres by these measurements often impede employees from providing the quality customer service they want to. Though nobody would deny the necessity of improving customer satisfaction, rewards are rarely based upon this.
What can you do?
Leading edge companies are ditching traditional call centre metrics to focus exclusively on customer focus. Your staff deal directly with your customers: they are the face of your business. Being at the frontline, their knowledge of your business and your customers is unparallelled.
Implementing a staff satisfaction survey is a visible and transparent way of showing your employees that you value their contribution and opinions. Employee surveys can also help you learn from the direct experiences of your staff to drive service improvements.
What are the drivers of employee engagement?
No matter what industry you are in, there are common factors that make employees feel engaged.
- Organisational clarity: Employees like to understand the purpose of their roles and how they fit into an organisation. Companies that have a strong, transparent and explicit organisational culture tend to engender trust and understanding amongst their employees.
- Good management: Managers who are clear about their expectations, offer feedback, support & training and treat each employee as an individual help to increase staff satisfaction.
- Listening: Employees need to feel that their opinions are being listened to and their viewpoints matter.
- Organisational honesty: Companies that live by the values they publicly espouse are much more likely to illicit employee advocacy and trust.
We can help you with all aspects of your employee surveying needs.
Opinion-8 has vast experience in the field of employee research and can assist you in creating a survey that will identify ways to improve employee engagement, advocacy and commitment as well as highlighting ways in which you can serve your customers better.
For more information: www.opinion-8.com/employee feedback