Inexpensively Motivate Your Call Center Agents

Life would be so easy if motivation could exclusively from within us! However, more often than not, it's up to management to maintain employee morale. To activate and inspire self-motivation and boost 'morale' amongst employees, you need to be a dynamic leader. And unfortunately the toughest challenge for call centre managers is keeping this 'morale' at a high level. If your employees are miserable, low productivity and high labor turnover can be the net result. Therefore, it is important to keep your call center agents happy, enthusiastic and motivated all the time.

Working as a contact center agent can be highly demanding, challenging and dynamic. Hence call center stress is very common. Meeting strict deadlines and maintaining quality standards, handling enormous number of call volumes and satisfying angry and frustrated callers - yes, call center agents manage all of this and more. All of these job requirements also need to be met in real time and within the rules and confines of the call center.

So, now the question is how you keep your contact center employees motivated and happy. Workplace motivators include both monetary and non-monetary incentives. Both are equally important but in this article we talk about non-monetary incentives and how they can be used to reduce attrition and keep your call center agents happy and satisfied. It is a lot easier to motivate with money, but the motivation tips mentioned below are much longer lasting and can help transform the organization:

Mentoring and Coaching - It will be helpful to have a coaching plan in place for the employees. Spending time and coaching employees will make them feel more involved with the organization. It will help good employees, become better.

Praise in public- correct in private. Nothing in the world replaces genuine praise. We often carry a notion in which we believe that praising an employee might lead to distraction and over-confidence. Make praises behavior specific, sincere, timely and public (whenever possible). Contact center certification will lead to praise for the entire call center and by extension, every agent that works there.

Be a psychologist. Everyone in your team has different personalities - adapt accordingly. See things from their perspective and communicate freely. Be what you are and you will see agents open up to you. In addition, you can hire a call center consulting firm to help you identify where you can improve.

Delegate and share responsibility. Give representatives an opportunity to supervise. By rewarding your employees with more responsibilities you will involve them in the organizational web and boost employee recognition.

360 form of evaluation. Allow employees to evaluate you as well. Get the feedback from them and improvise on the points they mention. Make feedback and evaluation a two-way process. If you act to the feedbacks you receives, so will the employees. Set an example.

Increase Hierarchical Positions for Motivation. Stretch the organizational chart by adding more levels of management to your call center structure. Add up to 5 or may be 10 levels to effectively manage all agents. This will also encourage the process of promotion from one level to another.

In the rough times of economic crisis, you must keep your employees happy in order to maximize your companies return on investment and to reduce attrition or turnover rates. A combination of both monetary and non-monetary incentives will keep your call center agents motivated. More importantly, try concentrating on incentive programs such as recognition, appraisal, collaboration and promotion. It will make the employees happy and ultimately your organization will prosper.